I am often amused by claims that we understand Earth’s climate system, are able to accurately measure its behavior, eliminate all potential variables except CO2 as the primary driver of Earth’s temperature and make predictions of Earth’s temperature decades into the future, all with a high degree of confidence. I have been studying Earth’s climate system for several years and have found it to be a ridiculously complex, continually evolving and sometimes chaotic beast. Furthermore, our understanding of Earth’s climate system is currently rudimentary at best, our measurement capabilities are limited and our historical record is laughably brief. To help demonstrate the complexity of Earth’s climate system I have been compiling a list of all of the variables potentially involved in Earth’s climate system. This is a work in progress so additions, recommendations, corrections, questions etc. are most welcome. Once I develop this further and polish it up a bit I plan to convert it into a new WUWT Reference Page.

UPDATED: This list has undergone significant revisions and improvements based upon crowdsourcing the input of an array of very intelligent and knowledgeable contributors below. Additionally, this list was posted in comments in WUWT a few times previously, receiving input from a number of other very intelligent and knowledgeable contributors. This thread, along with links to the precursor threads below, will thus serve as the bibliography for the forthcoming WUWT Potential Climatic Variables reference page (unless someone can up with a better name for it…:)

“By analyzing the minute changes in travel times and wave shapes for each doublet, the researchers concluded that the Earth’s inner core is rotating faster than its surface by about 0.3-0.5 degrees per year.

“The presence of the moon (which has about 1/81 the mass of the Earth), is slowing Earth’s rotation and lengthening the day by about 2 ms every one hundred years.”

“However some large scale events, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, have caused the rotation to speed up by around 3 microseconds.[21] Post-glacial rebound, ongoing since the last Ice age, is changing the distribution of the Earth’s mass thus affecting the Moment of Inertia of the Earth and, by the Conservation of Angular Momentum, the Earth’s rotation period.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation

Earth’s orbit around the Sun, Earth’s tilt, Earth’s wobble and the Moon’s orbit around Earth, Earth’s Rotation, and the gravity of the Moon, Sun and Earth, act in concert to determine the constantly evolving Tidal Force on Earth:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force

The gravity of the Moon, Sun and Earth, Earth’s rotation, Earth’s orbit around the Sun, Earth’s tilt, Earth’s wobble and the Moon’s orbit around Earth act in concert to determine the constantly evolving Tidal Force on Earth:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force

force is a tectonic plate force due to subduction. Plate motion is partly driven by the weight of cold, dense plates sinking into the mantle at trenches. This force and the slab suction force account for most of the overall force acting on plate tectonics, and the Ridge Push;http://en.wikipedia.org

“Climate change on ultra-long time scales (tens of millions of years) are more than likely connected to plate tectonics.”

“Through the course of a Wilson cycle continents collide and split apart, mountains are uplifted and eroded, and ocean basins open and close. The re-distribution and changing size and elevation of continental land masses may have caused climate change on long time scales”;http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ice/chill.html

Grand Minimum;
Leif Svalgaard says: February 6, 2011 at 8:26 pmIf L&P are correct and sunspots become effectively] invisible [not gone] it might mean another Grand Minimum lasting perhaps 50 years. During this time the solar cycle is still operating, cosmic rays are still modulated, and the solar wind is still buffeting the Earth.”
“It will lead to a cooling of a couple of tenths of a degree.”

remain in the stratosphere for only a few months, they have only minor climatic effects, and they can be spread around the world by high-altitude winds. This suspended material contributes to spectacular sunsets.

sulfuric acid by the sun’s rays reacting with stratospheric water vapor to form sulfuric acid aerosol layers. The aerosol remains in suspension long after solid ash particles have fallen to earth and forms a layer of sulfuric acid droplets between 15 to 25 kilometers up. Fine ash particles from an eruption column fall out too quickly to significantly cool the atmosphere over an extended period of time, no matter how large the eruption.

Sulfur aerosols last many years, and several historic eruptions show a good correlation of sulfur dioxide layers in the atmosphere with a decrease in average temperature decrease of subsequent years. The close correlation was first established after the 1963 eruption of Agung volcano in Indonesia when it was found that sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and stayed as a sulfuric acid aerosol.

Without replenishment, the sulfuric acid aerosol layer around the earth is gradually depleted, but it is renewed by each eruption rich in sulfur dioxide. This was confirmed by data collected after the eruptions of El Chichon, Mexico (1982) and Pinatubo, Philippines (1991), both of which were high-sulfur compound carriers like Agung, Indonesia.”http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm

There is also some evidence that if “volcanic activity was high enough, then a water vapor anomaly would be introduced into the lower stratosphere before the anomaly due to the previous eruption had disappeared. The result would be threefold in the long term: stratospheric cooling, stratospheric humidification, and surface warming due to the positive radiative forcing associated with the water vapor.”
See: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2003)016%3C3525%3AAGSOVE%3E2.0.CO%3B2#h1

“Besides the galactic tide, the main trigger for sending comets into the inner Solar System is believed to be interaction between the Sun’s Oort cloud and the gravitational fields of near-by stars or giant molecular clouds.”

that “act as cloud condensation nuclei, they alter albedo (both directly and indirectly via clouds) and hence Earth’s radiation budget, and they serve as catalysts of or sites for atmospheric chemistry reactions.”

Clouds form as parcels of air cool and the water vapor in them condenses, forming small liquid droplets of water. However, under normal circumstances, these droplets form only where there is some “disturbance” in the otherwise “pure” air. In general, aerosol particles provide this “disturbance”. The particles around which cloud droplets coalesce are called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or sometimes “cloud seeds”. Amazingly, in the absence of CCN, air containing water vapor needs to be “supersaturated” to a humidity of about 400% before droplets spontaneously form! So, in almost all circumstances, aerosols play a vital role in the formation of clouds.”http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/aerosol_cloud_nucleation_dimming.html

remain in the stratosphere for only a few months, they have only minor climatic effects, and they can be spread around the world by high-altitude winds. This suspended material contributes to spectacular sunsets.

which reacts with OH and water in the stratosphere to create sulfate aerosols with a residence time of about 2–3 years.”

“Emission rates of [Sulfur Dioxide] SO2 from an active volcano range from 10 million tonnes/day according to the style of volcanic activity and type and volume of magma involved. For example, the large explosive eruption of Mount Pinatubo on 15 June 1991 expelled 3-5 km3 of dacite magma and injected about 20 million metric tons of SO2 into the stratosphere. The sulfur aerosols resulted in a 0.5-0.6°C cooling of the Earth’s surface in the Northern Hemisphere.”http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php

“The 1815 eruption [of Mount Tambora] is rated 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the only such eruption since the Lake Taupo eruption in about 180 AD. With an estimated ejecta volume of 160 cubic kilometers, Tambora’s 1815 outburst was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.”

because of the effect on North American and European weather. Agricultural crops failed and livestock died in much of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in the worst famine of the 19th century.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora

“In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent “dry fog” was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the “fog”. It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.”

sulfuric acid by the sun’s rays reacting with stratospheric water vapor to form sulfuric acid aerosol layers. The aerosol remains in suspension long after solid ash particles have fallen to earth and forms a layer of sulfuric acid droplets between 15 to 25 kilometers up. Fine ash particles from an eruption column fall out too quickly to significantly cool the atmosphere over an extended period of time, no matter how large the eruption.

Sulfur aerosols last many years, and several historic eruptions show a good correlation of sulfur dioxide layers in the atmosphere with a decrease in average temperature decrease of subsequent years. The close correlation was first established after the 1963 eruption of Agung volcano in Indonesia when it was found that sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and stayed as a sulfuric acid aerosol.

Without replenishment, the sulfuric acid aerosol layer around the earth is gradually depleted, but it is renewed by each eruption rich in sulfur dioxide. This was confirmed by data collected after the eruptions of El Chichon, Mexico (1982) and Pinatubo, Philippines (1991), both of which were high-sulfur compound carriers like Agung, Indonesia.”http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm

There is also some evidence that if “volcanic activity was high enough, then a water vapor anomaly would be introduced into the lower stratosphere before the anomaly due to the previous eruption had disappeared. The result would be threefold in the long term: stratospheric cooling, stratospheric humidification, and surface warming due to the positive radiative forcing associated with the water vapor.”
See: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2003)016%3C3525%3AAGSOVE%3E2.0.CO%3B2#h1

“or reflection coefficient, is the diffuse reflectivity or reflecting power of a surface. It is defined as the ratio of reflected radiation from the surface to incident radiation upon it. Being a dimensionless fraction, it may also be expressed as a percentage, and is measured on a scale from zero for no reflecting power of a perfectly black surface, to 1 for perfect reflection of a white surface.”

“act as cloud condensation nuclei, they alter albedo (both directly and indirectly via clouds) and hence Earth’s radiation budget, and they serve as catalysts of or sites for atmospheric chemistry reactions.”

“Aerosols play a critical role in the formation of clouds. Clouds form as parcels of air cool and the water vapor in them condenses, forming small liquid droplets of water. However, under normal circumstances, these droplets form only where there is some “disturbance” in the otherwise “pure” air. In general, aerosol particles provide this “disturbance”. The particles around which cloud droplets coalesce are called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or sometimes “cloud seeds”. Amazingly, in the absence of CCN, air containing water vapor needs to be “supersaturated” to a humidity of about 400% before droplets spontaneously form! So, in almost all circumstances, aerosols play a vital role in the formation of clouds.”http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/aerosol_cloud_nucleation_dimming.html

to acquire energy. They use the energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic materials to be utilized in cellular functions such as biosynthesis and respiration.” “In plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen as a waste product.”

are phylogenetically diverse, but groups that include conspicuous or biogeochemically-important taxa include the sulfur-oxidizing gamma and epsilon proteobacteria, the Aquificaeles, the Methanogenic archaea and the neutrophilic iron-oxidizing bacteria.”

is the biological conversion of one or more carbon molecules (usually carbon dioxide or methane) and nutrients into organic matter using the oxidation of inorganic molecules (e.g. hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide) or methane as a source of energy, rather than sunlight, as in photosynthesis.”

I think it is incorrect to call earth’s climate system ridiculous. It is our current understanding of it’s dynamics that is ridiculous… except I don’t hear much laughter regarding such. We are struggling, in a low resolution, stage of understanding, is all. Things will become clearer, as soon as proper scientific focus and methods are restored. Maybe soon. GK

Wow, just Wow. In ’95 I had collected lots of data about fishing in central Oh., 23 factors in all. Everything from the phase of the moon to surface temps to ph. to baro pressure, on and on. Unable to calculate a formula for catching fish I contacted a prof. of engineering friend who then referred me to a mathmatics prof., She was exstatic about so much data. Two weeks later I was told simply “It’s not humanly possible to calculate this many variables, not even deep blue can do this.” Shame, lots of money in bass fishing here. I believed her though. Looking at your list bogles my simple mind, climate models, I think not. But there is lots of money in this, as such I believe those here and elsewhere who claim this is about redistribution of wealth. Wuwt has turned this skeptic into a full blown denier and I thank you all for standing up for truth.

The point is, you need to keep it short. Attention spans these days are vanishingly small – if that wasn’t the case we wouldn’t be in the fix we are today. Although I must say that even in the era I grew up in (60’s/70’s), your post would still have been TLDR.

The message that it is complicated doesn’t have to be communicated by demonstration; there are better ways to get that message across.

Excellent article. I also spotted a phenomena I was completely unfamiliar with: Namely in the North Poles region Ice Map it appears when melting in that region first begin most every-time it’s in the region between Ellesmere Island (Canada) and just slightly North of Thule, Greenland. Perhaps someone could help me understand why that particular region first, what are the ocean currents in that Strait, Strait water temperature at various depths, or peculiar weather patterns that cause such an effect. That particular melts appear before surrounding ice even begins to melt – never would have noticed but for this exercise. That’s weird. I’ve always seen ice melt at the edges first then moved backward. That particular area is not a normal ice melt – it should not melt in the middle first.

However, isn’t sulfur, sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid, more “important” parts of the atmosphere, alongside soot, than perhaps argon? Not to say argon might not have a major impact on earth’s atmosphere, no studies seem to exist, but pretty much everything sulfur has been studied as far as everyone seem to know.

If pointing out details . . . :p

Also, isn’t there really no study that has been done on how Earth behaves when the good old Sol quiets down and withdraws its influence into itself? I find that very weird considering what we already know about gravitational forces and all.

Bystander says: June 30, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Thomas S says @ June 30, 2011 at 3:17 pm “Holy….!! This post will go down in history as the post that killed the AGW debate once in for all.’

That seems to be a silly thing to say.- there is a vast amount of science being done in each area and the basic physics and chemistry are know.

It is like saying because the human body is complex no one should pursue an understanding of disease.

—–
By no means am I suggesting we stop research, just saying that by seeing all these complexities in one place with links to research on each one of them. I am hoping that these AGW fanatics who will not accept any other explanation other than CO2 is the only driver should have there eyes opened by this post.

Yeah it was a bit tongue in cheek for me to say “end debate once in for all”. Its just most people pointing to CO2 as the reason for all these weather events, probably have not considered even a SINGLE driver listed in this post as a possible alternative.

“Solar Ultraviolet (UV) radiation; appears to vary by approximately 10% during the solar cycle; and has been hypothesized to influence Earth’s climate; however Lief argues that, This is well-trodden ground. Nothing new to add, just the same old, tired arguments. Perhaps a note on EUV: as you can see here (pdf, slide 13) the energy in the EUV band [and other UV bands] is very tiny; many orders of magnitude less than what shines down on our heads each day. So a larger solar cycle variation of EUV does not make any significant difference in the energy budget. Leif Svalgaard says: April 5, 2011 at 7:54 pm”

Unless, perhaps, the ultraviolet radiation is ionizing and produces a significant flux of electrons and cation radicals in the upper atmosphere. Cation radicals, as we all know from cloud chamber effects, can produce condensation nuclei and induce clouds. Slides 2 and 3 in the link show that both cation radicals and the freed electron can produce independent cascades of droplet nucleation. Nature is full of cascades produced by small initial perturbations.

Did I miss where non-anthropogenic biological feedback is factored in? Those pesky bacteria.

Curiousgeorge says: June 30, 2011 at 3:45 pm

You forgot a significant variable: Biological. Everything that isn’t human on land, air and sea.

You are both correct. I am going to change this thing on the fly, thus I’ve changed the “Anthropogenic” header to “Biology”, added Plant, Bacteria, Fungi, Protozoa, Chromista and Animal under it and made Anthropogenic a sub-bullet of Biology – Animal.

Thank you for your help. Additional input on this section, especially links to sources indicating biological impacts on climate, are most welcome.

I followed it with interest and I have no climate research training. I find the sheer number of variables exciting and truly astounding. Our system is amazing. However, is it me, or did it look like magnetic effects and atmospheric tide were duplicated in the list?

And, I’ve found it difficult to create a long list of variables without it being a long list of variables.

justthefactswuwt says:
June 30, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Quote: Thank you for your help. Additional input on this section, especially links to sources indicating biological impacts on climate, are most welcome.
————————-
Would exploding whale parts feeding the aerobic bacteria in the ocean and sand do anything?

Dunno about just a page, you’re in serious danger of gathering enough data here for a whole new website – well done, one heck of a project. Good luck with it.

I’d like to add mention that many, if not most or all, of the oscillations mentioned in “Gravitation” are probably also synchronised by resonance effects of the whole terrestrial system (honourable mention here of the ‘Stadium wave’ which suggests how the energy may transfer between the different oscillations). I also suspect related resonsnce influences in both solar system and solar data – after all, the whole system has had plenty of time to fall into ‘sync’, and we know that weather is broadly cyclical.

Oh. And you may need, under “Anthropogenic”: “Political interference with any or all of the above”. It’ll be one heck of a parameter to calculate, but boy, if someone could work out a formula allowing that to be allowed for …

But could it all just boil down to the net size, intensity and positioning of the surface air pressure distribution?

Variations in that distribution acting via the location of the various climate zones and the weather within them seem to be well capable of stabilising everything thrown at the climate system over a period of more than 4 billion years so as to avoid the loss of our liquid oceans.

That’s going to be a very valuable page. It’s nice to see all of the known factors impacting climate in one place. Unfortuantely, I suspect that we are still in the “unknown unknowns” stage of climate investigations, but we are, at least the list of “known unknowns” is increasing.

““In the climate system, there are 14 orders of magnitude of scale, from the planetary scale–which is 40 million meters–down to the scale of one of the little aerosol particles on which wetter vapor can change phase to a liquid [cloud-particle]–which is a fraction of a millionths of a millimeter.”
Of these 14 orders of magnitude, notes Schlesinger, researchers are able to include in their models only the two largest, the planetary scale and the scale of weather disturbances

And I suppose next you’re going to tell us that’s just the easy part? The real gap in our knowledge is the unknowns that we don’t know we don’t know about!

There are layers to it. There are variables “we” know about, but that I don’t know about, then there are variables “we” don’t know about, then there is the interaction and inter-dependencies of all of these variables that we know about, then there is the interaction and inter-dependencies of all of these variables that we don’t know about, then there is the fact that many of these variables, interactions and inter-dependencies are continually evolving, e.g. the Ocean Circulation today was different that is was on any day in Earth’s history and then there are other climatic factors involved that haven’t been considered yet. We are at the beginning of a very long road that will take many generations to travel…

Admittedly climate is ridiculously complicated, but individual pieces are readily understood. The AGW crowd of course cannot make the predictions that they claim using the primitive, specifically and artificially limited models that they use.

But, the assumptions and specific claims that they make are usually based on little pieces of the climate system and these can be refuted quite nicely. And the claims they make about what is happening in the real world are usually wrong and can also be easily refuted.

Thus, even though we cannot prove their predictions are wrong, except by pointing to the real world and their past predictions, we can show that their assumptions are faulty and their reports of the real world are fraud. The public does not like to hear that we do not know for sure what is going to happen and tend to favor those who claim to know the future, even though they are wrong.

But, we can and should break the AGW assumptions. They claim all natural cycles and factors have been overwhelmed by CO2, making study of the past irrelevant, when, in fact, study of climate history and all of the ways we can determine and explain climatic changes in the past, recognizing in the process the natural factors at work, is the best way to make sentient predictions.

The current predictions of the next solar cycles and the Sun’s activities are good examples of using the past and our science to understand the potentials of the future. That’s our real strength.

The point is, you need to keep it short. Attention spans these days are vanishingly small – if that wasn’t the case we wouldn’t be in the fix we are today. Although I must say that even in the era I grew up in (60′s/70′s), your post would still have been TLDR.

The message that it is complicated doesn’t have to be communicated by demonstration; there are better ways to get that message across.

IMHO, YMMV, etc.

I think you are underestimating the intelligence and diligence of WUWT’s readership.

This is great “justthefacts”, what a round up – Thanks you, I am but a layperson in this so it’s lots of very interesting reading. Anthony may have to make your post another tab on the reference page.

My only concern is with the wiki links – as they still reference AGW in these articles…like this one:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles Two caveats are necessary: that anthropogenic effects may modify or even overwhelm orbital effects and that the mechanism by which orbital forcing influences climate is not well understood.

And yes, I know to take ‘their AGW claim’ part with a grain of salt the size of Montreal – but it makes me doubt them and wonder if they were as cavalier about other details that didn’t suite their political views.

To me, it looks though you could go down this road a while, there is a great deal to examine. It also seems as though the end result would probably be an understanding of what we don’t yet know. That is, of course, the proper place to start, as opposed to dragging out one suspect and hanging him in front of the entire town without a proper trial, then declaring that the case is solved!

So which one (or set) of those variables caused the Little Ice Age (end of MWP to 1900)?
The volcanoes are too short-lived. The TSI is too invariable. The UV lacks the energy %. The Milankovitch cycles are too short. In fact, we don’t have anything concrete as of yet.

Re TL, DR… Nope, I read it all, found it just the right length. Excellent work, and thank you for posting this.

My two cents: the measured temperatures on land drop dramatically when a mass of still air, with low humidity, forms and remains in place for many hours. This is especially true when this occurs overnight. We see temperatures drop into the low 30s and high 20s (in degrees F) even during non-winter periods. This might be already included in the above list, I didn’t see it.

Also, impacts of jet aircraft exhaust at high altitudes, perhaps this is covered under Anthropogenic effects.

Also, the impact of removing heat from thermal and nuclear power plants, as a good portion of the rejected heat is used to evaporate water, either in a cooling tower, or an evaporative pond. Another great portion of that rejected heat is released to once-through cooling of a lake, or the ocean, or another body of water.

Land use changes is on the list, and I’d like to point out that Man has planted literally millions of forms of trees, shrubs, and grass-type plants just in Southern California alone. What was once a dry desert is now green from planting and watering. The CO2 uptake may be negligible and not subject to measurement, but surely it has some impact.

I didn’t notice a category for the effects on earths climate from passing comets, meteor Impacts and rare asteroid impact events, Meteors and interplanetary dust particles and the gases from these particles add about [Add an estimate here] tons of mass to Earth and earths atmosphere each year, it could be as significant or not as man made co2 but it is another factor.

Please pardon a probably really dumb question, but this is something that has been bugging me for a while. The ENSO Sea Surface Temperature graphic here .
So then is it Vorticity that makes the SST leave the wake pattern that it does in the oceans? The speed of rotation at the poles versus the speed of rotation at the equator and the speed of rotation at deeper depths versus the speed of rotation at the surface, along with the ocean currents, that causes changes in various water temperatures.
The same phenomenom may also affect air masses as Stephen Wilde discusses.

While providing a useful and interesting compendium of links, I don’t see the point of this piece in terms of making an argument either way on AGW. There are a lot of phenomena. There is a substantial scientific community addressing those phenomena. What of it?

Either human effects are large enough to worry about, or they aren’t. Regardless of how well understood the system is, there will be a best-informed view of that question, and that question will be important.

You take the needle, bury it in the haystack, and then question whether there is a needle at all. If this defense works nobody will ever be able to make a case for anything.

Outstanding post! I look forward to seeing the other half regarding biological influences on atmosphere and climate, including biological changes in the use of land, ocean and atmosphere. Taking into account accuracy of observation and recording would be useful as well.
I would also recommend a more balanced approach to the section regarding Solar EUV/UV observations, which truly are in their infancy. Although there have been several speculative theories, no one has had time to measure and analyze what happens when we change from (TSI = solar constant) to [(TSI – 0.1%) – (10% EUV/UV)]. Although I’ve heard it said that our atmosphere is “opaque” or “nearly” opaque to EUV/UV, I wonder whether there isn’t enough that gets through the atmosphere to excite oxygen and water enough that its absence would be perceptibly missed.
And, given that the prolonged lack of significant solar wind has seemingly caused the collapse of the outer atmosphere, I would think more observation should be devoted to whether that causes changes in other parts of the atmosphere coupled with the climate.
But those are just my personal interests.
Keep up the wonderful work!

This is the article I have been waiting for!
A while ago I wanted to gather together all the parameters that would need to go into THE MODEL we would need to predict climate. I soon realised that I did not have anywhere near the knowledge and from this list I can see that I was not even close. (I came up with only about a dozen factors)

The list above is an excellent start and can only grow.
What might also be interesting would be to produce a matrix indicating how each factor affects any of the other factors.

When that is done then maybe Al Gore or the Hockey Team will be kind enough to show us how they have solved it all.

I knew all of this insane and insurmountable complexity in 1984 (I was a geology major) when I tried (unsuccessfully) to convince my college roommate that humans could NOT control the world’s weather in in WAY, SHAPE OR FORM… His ignorance of the true complexity was resolute and I soon gave up. Twenty seven years later, his ignorance is now represented in every government n the world… Ugh.

“I didn’t notice a category for the effects on earths climate from passing comets, meteor Impacts and rare asteroid impact events, Meteors and interplanetary dust particles and the gases from these particles add about [Add an estimate here] tons of mass to Earth and earths atmosphere each year, it could be as significant or not as man made co2 but it is another factor.”

Sorry!! that category is there, I found it the third time I looked. It’s 1:58 am here and I’m half asleep. :)
good job!!

The point is, you need to keep it short. Attention spans these days are vanishingly small – if that wasn’t the case we wouldn’t be in the fix we are today. Although I must say that even in the era I grew up in (60′s/70′s), your post would still have been TLDR.

This will be a reference page, don’t think of it as a regular post. I think a model of not too many reference pages, but each being substantial is good. That limits the amount of clicking on page to find the right one, and searches within a page have a decent chance of reaching the goal.

Justthefacts – I noticed a Lief (should be Leif) somewhere above that you’ll want to fix.

You could also use this as a primer or extended table of contents to the reference pages. You could include hyperlinks to the WUWT reference pages since it’s a long weekend…

Rather than insert another comment into the system, If Mike Tobis reads down this far: At WUWT, not every single post is about Global Warming, climate science or flinging poo over the fence(s). If you want to debate the physics and math head over to Judy’s or Lucia’s. If you want to debate the the warming/not-warming I’m sure another post on that topic will appear here in a day or less.

/rant Sorry, I’m just tired of commentators demanding what websites and posters should do to satisfy their view of what the site is.

This will be a reference page, don’t think of it as a regular post. I think a model of not too many reference pages, but each being substantial is good. That limits the amount of clicking on page to find the right one, and searches within a page have a decent chance of reaching the goal.

Very correct and very nice to meet you over lunch today.

Justthefacts – I noticed a Lief (should be Leif) somewhere above that you’ll want to fix.

I have been studying Earth’s climate system for several years and have found it to be a ridiculously complex, continually evolving and sometimes chaotic beast.

The climate is the very definition of a chaotic system. I heard an interview with Lorenz (discoverer of chaos theory). He had run a climate model and there was a problem before the run could be completed. He needed the results and didn’t have enough time to run the model again. He decided to run the model with fewer significant digits. That would speed up the process with, he thought, a loss of accuracy. The results were, however, completely different. This led to: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? ” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

However, is it me, or did it look like magnetic effects and atmospheric tide were duplicated in the list?

Some of them show up in multiple locations, because they have a number of causes or we’re not sure of the cause, e.g. “Atmospheric tides can be excited by:
The regular day/night cycle in the insolation of the atmosphere [Rotational Energy and Solar Energy]
The gravitational field pull of the Moon [Gravity]
Non-linear interactions between tides and planetary waves. [Gravity, Rotational Energy & Solar Energy]
Large-scale latent heat release due to deep convection in the tropics. [Solar Energy, Rotational Energy?]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_tide

My only concern is with the wiki links – as they still reference AGW in these articles…like this one:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Two caveats are necessary: that anthropogenic effects may modify or even overwhelm orbital effects and that the mechanism by which orbital forcing influences climate is not well understood.

I’ve also struggled with the use of Wiki and eschewed them for a couple years, but there have been some improvements, they are the most comprehensive source and I’ve decided that the best way to fix the issues with Wiki is to shine the light of scrutiny on them, just as you have done.

This contribution is priceless. Last year, I spent several weeks on Donna´s IPCC audit. What about crowd-sourcing?
AND, what about our friendly Castor X neighbors: for decades, they enjoyed the distinction of Greatest Changers of the Earth´s surface!

Bystander says:
June 30, 2011 at 3:40 pm
“That seems to be a silly thing to say.- there is a vast amount of science being done in each area and the basic physics and chemistry are know.It is like saying because the human body is complex no one should pursue an understanding of disease.”

Cool!!! So, now you are going to show us the physical hypotheses that enable explanation and prediction of forcings and that go beyond Arrhenius’ work to reveal that dangerous warming from CO2 is coming down the pike? Huh? Huh? Are you going to do it?

So which one (or set) of those variables caused the Little Ice Age (end of MWP to 1900)?
The volcanoes are too short-lived. The TSI is too invariable. The UV lacks the energy %. The Milankovitch cycles are too short. In fact, we don’t have anything concrete as of yet.

My best guess is the combination of volcanoes cooling Earth down, coupled with the slight decrease in TSI and some secondary solar influence on clouds, e.g. cosmic rays or otherwise, limiting the rebound in Earth’s temperature between volcanoes, but this is nothing more than a guess.

My two cents: the measured temperatures on land drop dramatically when a mass of still air, with low humidity, forms and remains in place for many hours. This is especially true when this occurs overnight. We see temperatures drop into the low 30s and high 20s (in degrees F) even during non-winter periods. This might be already included in the above list, I didn’t see it.

Also, impacts of jet aircraft exhaust at high altitudes, perhaps this is covered under Anthropogenic effects.

I added contrails added under Anthropogenic.

Also, the impact of removing heat from thermal and nuclear power plants, as a good portion of the rejected heat is used to evaporate water, either in a cooling tower, or an evaporative pond. Another great portion of that rejected heat is released to once-through cooling of a lake, or the ocean, or another body of water.

Added under Anthropogenic as Nuclear Power Generation, also to include nuclear ships, especially Ice Breakers. This also makes me wonder about and add other sources of waste heat such fossil fuel energy generation, sewage/wastewater treatment discharge, run off from Asphalt/urban heat islands, etc. all added to the Anthropogenic list.

Land use changes is on the list, and I’d like to point out that Man has planted literally millions of forms of trees, shrubs, and grass-type plants just in Southern California alone. What was once a dry desert is now green from planting and watering. The CO2 uptake may be negligible and not subject to measurement, but surely it has some impact.

Yes, I’ve added “Including De and Re-Forestation” to Land Use Changes to remind me of the scope when I build Land Use out further. The non-CO2 Anthropogenic variablesare quite impressive in isolation.

Does anybody think that non-linear thermal properties of the materials in the climatic system MIGHT make it just a TINY LITTLE BIT COMPLEX ? Oh, and they vary with pressure as well.

So there are probably a few hundred to a thousand inputs to any “computer model” of the climate, think if one or two are off by a tad the outcome might disagree with the empirical evidence ?

In aerospace engineering FEM (Finite Element Modeling) has been used to predict the strength of airframes (airplane bodies and wings) with great success. The number of inputs;

1 – the stress/strain response of the materials (mostly aluminum and carbon composites)
2 – the force applied
3 – the number of “mesh” points, this is the number of discrete points on the computer model where the calculations are performed (usually hundreds of thousands or millions)

A Factor of Safety (FOS = predicted strength/required strength) of 1.5 to 2.0 is used for things live people will ride in.

That means that the computer models we rely on for everyday engineering feats are ASSUMED TO BE WRONG BY 50 to 100%.

In the engineering field we have a saying; “If your hardware does not perform as your model predicted, you must improve your MODEL!!!”

And the climate models can tell us the temperature in 2100 within a few tenth’s of a degree, sure they can……

The whole point is to counter AGW as sound bite: “It’s the CO2.” “No, it’s far more complicated, and we don’t know as yet the proper weighting of the many factors which produce climate — check this out.”

Very useful list, clearly demonstrating the unbelievable arrogance and ignorance of IPCC.
Just two comments:
1) I didn’t notice mentioned a crucial “CO2 increase = vegetation growth” feedback mechanism (increase of CO2 absorption by the plants due to the increase of plants’ growth due to the increase of CO2 content in the atmosphere), which negates any alleged increase of temperature due to the increase of CO2. May be it was included in some already listed category, I don’t know.

2) Special references to Dr. Svalgaard’s opinions are unnecessary; they don’t deserve any special consideration or exposure.

This is a good post in that it records a lot of influences which have, without doubt, complicated cross-influences that altogether bring about the final result. It is, however, more of an argument for a warmist, specialist or elitist superiority in understanding or opinion, similar to one some of our post-war parents might have said to us as teenagers: what do you know? they (the government, the scientists, adults) know more than you do.

It is a fallacy that very complicated systems require very long study and detailed investigation to understand their probable output. As a discussion in Science News magazine (June 4/2011, Simple Heresy pp 26 – 29), simple rules of thumb can often be better predictors of outcome than complex mathematical models – a lesson the AAAS might well apply to the IPCC and their climate models (but which they, in their thrall of the IPCC/Mann, don’t apply).

In a previous WWUT post someone (I apologize in not knowing who) pointed out that the IPCC climate models, is considered as a “black box” in which much data goes in one side and a result comes out the other, can be back-engineered or back-modelled into several very, very simple mathematical relationships that connect global temperatures to CO2 levels. Not that we agree with this, but the point is well made: in even very complex models or proceses, only a few factors may be critical. Some, if not most, of climatic systems on the Earth appear to be either buffered by other systems or cancel each other out to the largest extent. This is not an unusual situation at all: think of your car’s engine running. Out of all the possible things that can go wrong and stop you in the middle of zombie-country at midnight, if you attend to the air, spark and fuel, you’ve probably attended to what is the problem. A split manifold or short-circuited motherboard may be the problem, as meteorite impacts or Washington-State level volcanic eruptions may be the reason the world went cold/warm, but those three things probably are what you should pay attention to.

The Earth’s climate is fundamentally the result of energy coming to the planet, energy reflected away from the planet, energy reaching theatmosphere/surface, and the in-place systems of moving the energy around the planet. These are the biggies. To believe that the small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a fundamental component is to believe that the system is inherently unstable. Our geological history shows that the system, though with episodes of high warmth and high cooling, is not inherently unstable. Things change, and stay changed for a long time. The rapid movement from glacial to interglacial states and back again do not display unstable tipping points but stable shifts. It is not the minutest of parameters that change and induce a major shift; it if were there would be many, many shifts and the movement from one to another would show the back-and-forth nature of a controlling parameter not-yet stable in its new configuration.

So, to come back to the point of this post, that the climate of Earth has many factors of which we are truly ignorant in their details and there interconnections, there is complete truth in this point. Those – like Mann, Trenberth, Gore, Suzuki, who claim to Know how things work on the planet, and how things will turn out, are, in fact, in egomanical self-idolatrous delusion, or simply using their doctorates and jargon to bafflegab and awe the rest of us. But as to the necessity of knowing a great deal about each factor and its influence on the others before a reasonable conclusion can be made, I suggest that the post is somewhat off.

The science blogs such as WUWT depend on the acceptance of what has been in legal circles called the Reasonable Man Hypothesis. The RMH suggests that, with a reasonable amount of knowledge, analytical ability and life-world experience, a non-expert can get the sense of what is going on and make a sound judgement of what action should be pursued on that basis. The gentleman-scholar of the 19th century understood this particularly well, for our benefit, for that is what the Darwins of the age were about: looking, thinking and judging carefully with the brain and thinking ability that God, they would have said, gave them. It is what we all do when we look at the GISTemp graph and wonder why it has such time and location sensitive warming biasis in it, and why the sea-level data took a sudden spike at the onset of satellite (TOPEX) observation, and then leveled off relative to the pre-satellite (pre-2002) times. We don’t know how satellites work, exactly, but we can see things that look suspiciously like data manipulations we have seen previously, understand the concept of perfectly, and wish answers for outside of what wavelength was being used at what specific height about the sea.

Complexity does not devolve into simplicity, but simplicity evolves, it appears, from complexity in the real-world. Chaos theory is great in theory but butterflies flapping in China do not actually cause hurricanes off of east Africa. The world survives because stability, rather than instability, dominates in the universe (catastrophic events notwithstanding). We have evolved, and the planet – including the crust – has become what it is because systems tend towards continuity, not disconuity. Perhaps Einstein would say his comment that “God does not play dice” applies to the way the climate system functions as well as how quantum physics governs the cosmos, despite how it works on an individual basis.

Ignorance of detail can be a killer, if, for example, you don’t know how long the fuse is you just lit. Knowledge of detail can also be a killer if, for example, you are busy calculating the length of fuse and speed of fuse-burning without considering that the fuse is coiled and will go straight to the explosive once lit. The climate argument of the IPCC is that detail is king, and only they, the experts, have a handle on all those fine points. The climate argument of the skeptics, on the other hand, is that few components count, and that you can determine within reasonable limits the power of those components from basic principles IN CONJUNTION WITH the understanding that the climate, as the world and universe, tends towards stability, not instability.

Whatever the outcome of this CAGW debate (I’d say foolishness, but that shows my position), a huge number of people are becoming accustomed to thinking for themselves. And educating themselves to the extent that they need. We all know the adage about not needing to be a weatherman to know the way the wind is blowing. The climate debate is teaching an entire thinking world that they can, with some effort, determine the reasonableness of what is going on without having to own a closetful of white coats.

All of this thinking and discussing and disagreeing is a very good thing. The power structures do not now like it. It messes us the AlGore sainthood processes, if not their bank accounts. Complex affairs are amenable to review by the non-illuminati. The illuminati are right in that the subject is worthy of many volumes of research, but the rest of us are right in that the pudding is tested in its abstract rather than its body.

“however Leif argues that,
This is well-trodden ground. Nothing new to add, just the same old, tired arguments. Perhaps a note on EUV: as you can see here (slide 13)http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2008ScienceMeeting/doc/Session1/S1_03_Kopp.pdf the energy in the EUV band [and other UV bands] is very tiny; many orders of magnitude less than what shines down on our heads each day. So a larger solar cycle variation of EUV does not make any significant difference in the energy budget.
Leif Svalgaard says: April 5, 2011 at 7:54 pm”
Thanyou I am now trying to understand slide 13 compared to this:
and this:http://news.discovery.com/space/mars-methane-mystery.html
Also The heat from radioactive decay does not seem to be counted in any of the radiative balance charts. is it about 0.8 W/M^2?

Your statement in the first paragraph, “I have been studying Earth’s climate system for several years and have found it to be a ridiculously complex, continually evolving and sometimes chaotic beast,” is incorrect. The closing phrase should read, “and always chaotic beast.”

The form of the partial differential equations that need to be solved in order to understand the aerodynamics of the atmosphere ALWAYS result in chaotic behavior. Small deviations in initial conditions, choice of grid construction and time steps will result in markedly different model predictions.

This is just the beginning of the climatological mathematical problems. We have to consider atmospheric H2O distributions, phase changes and associated thermodynamic implications. There is particulate distribution tracking and its implications in providing nucleation sources for H2O condensation. There are also chemical processes at work in the atmosphere, such as methane (CH4) conversion to CO2 in the presence of O2 and sunlight. [I could continue to go on for pages, but will stop here.]

As an aerospace engineer with years of computational fluid dynamics modeling experience, I have to laugh every time I hear about another weather or climate model. Aerodynamics modeling to this day still has problems predicting measures as basic as aircraft drag. How can they believe that the movement of the atmosphere can be predicted/solved with any confidence?

Thanks for the article,
wermet

[Note for full disclosure: while I am still a practicing aerospace engineer, I have not been personally involved in computational aerodynamic modeling for about a decade. However, I am still track of the capabilities of the state of the arts in this field.]

I am often amused by claims that we understand Earth’s climate system, are able to accurately measure its behavior, eliminate all potential variables except CO2 as the primary driver of Earth’s temperature and make predictions of Earth’s temperature decades into the future, all with a high degree of confidence.

no one makes these claims. Anyone who works in the field understands that observation systems both historical and current need improvement. If you would attend, say AGU conferences, you would see that the people working in the area are constantly asking for more measurement programs. And No one suggests that C02 is the primary driver, Mike Hulme, of CRU fame recently gave a talk about C02 contributing less than 50% of the human induced forcing, AR4 even has charts showing all the know factors. And nobody suggests the predictions ( actually projections) have a high degree of accuracy.

Exactly correct, these folks don’t even have a clue about how much they do not know….

I would much rather calculate how many angel’s would fit on the tip of a pin than attempt to predict the temperature in one hundred years………

I have been humbled many times when what I built did not perform as my model said it should, and I was just working with electronic circuits and optics, stuff that we supposedly totally understand.

In my field the proof (aka “in the pudding”) is what the real hardware does, not what the computer says “SHOULD” happen. Funny that planes even manage to fly when I’m sure there is a computer model someplace that shows it is NOT POSSIBLE.

Just a fyi, I frequently go to the Smithsonian Large Holocene Eruptions page and then follow up by looking at the Find Eruptions By Date page and it is always telling. Then I try to look up what the corresponding solar cycle was doing at the time. Your imagination has to kinda take it from there because the eruption altitudes are missing. Like nowadays we are almost to 1930’s levels of eruptions and the weather is as wild as described in the early 1930’s. But the weather was wild entering the LIA as well. We could see something resembling first one then the other depending on the altitudes. Nabro continues to blow.
Watching the continuing Nabro eruption from space | Eruptions | Big Think

You could, as well, consider the computational complexity of the computer algorithm that accurately models climate change using all known and unknown inputs.

We already know that local weather prediction algorithms frequently fail 24 hours out into the future. They can fail 30 minutes out. Billions have been spent on the algorithms since the first one failed miserably. The climate modelers claim to have algorithms that accurately predict the entire global climate 1, 5, 50, and 100 years into the future.

The complexity of the algorithm that supports all of the known inputs above very likely exceeds all the computing power of all computers for all time combined, and would probably take millions of years just to move from one climate model moment to the next.

Lorenz was right. Meanwhile I’m like a dog in a forest -too many knowledge trees to chose from.
Even spending 4 hrs a day on this post, it’ll take me a year to chase it all down. Thanks, justthefacts, for this labour of love, which will go down as the Thinking Person’s Guide to Climatology.

In the 19th century, Victorian age scientists were as convinced as modern mainstream climate scientists that they knew all there was to know. That all they had to do was tweak a few details and all would be revealed.

In the century since that time there have been more scientific discoveries made that in all off human history to that point combined. What we have come to understand is the the unknown unknowns, the things that we do not even realize we do not know, that there is an infinity of these discoveries before us. That the more we learn, the more questions there are.

Instead, climate science has bogged down on the idea that all we need to do is stop CO2 and all problems will be solved, that earth will be transformed into a paradise. This is a result of false logic. Most of the current problems stem from poverty and CO2 does nothing to fix this. It is a make believe solution to problems 100 years in the future, as an excuse for not dealing with today’s problems today.

Fix the todays problems today and the future will take care of itself.

C’mon, Mosh. We know it isn’t the working scientist like yourself who makes these claims. It is the know-nothing bureaucrats at IPCC, at the NGOs, and the environmentalist wackos who don’t understand what’s going on who make these claims. Why else would they be saying “the science is settled?”

The point is, you need to keep it short. Attention spans these days are vanishingly small – if that wasn’t the case we wouldn’t be in the fix we are today. Although I must say that even in the era I grew up in (60?s/70?s), your post would still have been TLDR.

steven mosher says:“If you would attend, say AGU conferences, you would see that the people working in the area are constantly asking for more measurement programs. And No one suggests that C02 is the primary driver…”

Oy way.
If you want to be taken seriously, Steven, you need to think before posting things that make people laugh at you.

I was wondering if this was due to destruction of ozone as the atmosphere “cleaned itself” after the eruptions, but yesterday I found a paper that may offer an explanation: One longer-time effect of the volcano eruptions was increased stratospheric water vapor.

” If the frequency of volcanic activity was high enough, then a water vapor anomaly would be introduced into the lower stratosphere before the anomaly due to the previous eruption had disappeared. The result would be threefold in the long term: stratospheric cooling, stratospheric humidification, and surface warming due to the positive radiative forcing associated with the water vapor.”

So could part of the warming in the 80s and 90s actually be caused by – and only briefly counteracted by! – the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions? I think so (but in the meantime AGW proponents are using volcano cooling for what it’s worth and even ignore the step change and talk about a downward “trend” in stratosphere temperatures as a “proof of AGW theory).

Just wanted to throw in yet another effect that may add to the complexity ;-)

With regard to the earth´s rotation causing plate tectonics, there are additional issues such as lithospheric convection and heat loss. Heat loss is achieved by so-called hot-spot volcanoes. Hawaii is an example on earth, whereas Mons Olympus is an example on Venus. On earth, in addition, the planet loses heat via plate tectonics, via lines of volcanoes at mid ocean ridges and at subduction zones (upwelling and downwelling limbs of convection respectively).

And this “no one” would be the likes of the IPCC and Govn’ts in the western world such as Germany, The UK, Australia and New Zealand? We constantly bombarded with acrticles in the media and Govn’t announcements which claim…”the science is settled. The climate is changing through human activities primarility through busining fossil fuels which emit catastrophic amounts of CO2, the main GHG.” Not sure where you are reading official announcements that state CO2 isn’t driving climate change however, the official line appears to be at odds with this part of your post.

Great read. What I find rediculous is the belief CO2 can drive climate change, as the system has evolved over ~4.5billion years and has managed, all on its lonesome, to recover from internal and external changes.

Plate Tectonics was said to be powered by Descending Slab Pull. I have never understood how doubling the drag on something would cause it to pull anything. Eureka!! If the core rotates faster than the lithosphere/mantle then this would explain plate tectonics. It would also explain why there is more movement to the west than east. Thank You.

Your list, long and comprehensive though it is may pick up a few more inputs as we learn more. It also shows how stupid the idea that it is all CO2, or even CO2 at all.

“If you don’t mind I will send a hard copy to the UK government Chief Scientific Advisor. It’ll reduce him to tears.”

Yes, tears of launghter. I read yesterday that HMG was raking in £40 billion per year in “green taxes”, and he is in charge of the “settled science” that underpins it. The Ministry of Truth will never admit that they are wrong.

Sorry for the rant – this is an excellent post and a good point of reference – please keep it up and develop it.

I think you are underestimating the intelligence and diligence of WUWT’s readership.

Ack. Look, sorry; yesterday wasn’t a good day. I hope you’ll accept my apology for what I see now was a fairly snippy first comment.

And I neglected to say how impressed I am at the amount of time and effort it muyst have taken to collate, check and categorise the many references above, and I thank you for doing so. It will no doubt prove a useful resource in the future.

Excellent post and reference page, justthefacts. Kudos.Additional input on this section, especially links to sources indicating biological impacts on climate, are most welcome.

If the carbon cycle is important, then:
=======
Inconceivable Bugs Eat Methane on the Ocean Floor, Science, July 2001

Most of the methane that rises toward the surface of the ocean floor vanishes before it even reaches the water. On page 484 of this issue, a team of researchers provides the clinching evidence for where all that methane goes: It is devoured by vast hordes of mud-dwelling microbes that belong to a previously unknown species of archaea.These methane-eating microbes–once thought to be impossible–now look to be profoundly important to the planet’s carbon cycle.http://www.sciencemag.org/content/293/5529/418.summary
========

no one makes these claims. Anyone who works in the field understands that observation systems both historical and current need improvement. If you would attend, say AGU conferences, you would see that the people working in the area are constantly asking for more measurement programs. And No one suggests that C02 is the primary driver, Mike Hulme, of CRU fame recently gave a talk about C02 contributing less than 50% of the human induced forcing, AR4 even has charts showing all the know factors. And nobody suggests the predictions ( actually projections) have a high degree of accuracy.

Strawman.

Let me first point out that in no way did I infer that everyone who believes AWG purports that “that we understand Earth’s climate system, are able to accurately measure its behavior, eliminate all potential variables except CO2 as the primary driver of Earth’s temperature and make predictions of Earth’s temperature decades into the future, all with a high degree of confidence.” I watched Scott Denning debate Roy Spenser yesterday, Scott was reasoned in his position and didn’t purport any of the things.

With that said, I’ve seen dozens of examples of this sentiment, several posted below.

“PARIS, Feb. 2 — In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely” causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

They said the world was in for centuries of climbing temperatures, rising seas and shifting weather patterns — unavoidable results of the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.”

““In our daily lives we all respond urgently to dangers that are much less likely than climate change to affect the future of our children,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which administers the panel along with the World Meteorological Organization.

“Feb. 2 will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet,” he went on. “The evidence is on the table.”

The report is the panel’s fourth assessment since 1990 on the causes and consequences of climate change, but it is the first in which the group asserts with near certainty — more than 90 percent confidence — that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of warming in the past half century.

“The language of science, like that of the United Nations, is by nature cautious and measured. That makes the dire tone of the just-released final report from the fourth assessment of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a network of thousands of international scientists, all the more striking. Global warming is “unequivocal.” Climate change will bring “abrupt and irreversible changes.” The report, a synthesis for politicians culled from three other IPCC panels convened throughout the year, read like what it is: a final warning to humanity. “Today the world’s scientists have spoken clearly, and with one voice,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, who attended the publication of the report in Valencia, Spain. Climate change “is the defining challenge of our age.”

The work of the IPCC, which was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month with Al Gore, underscores just how momentous that challenge will be. The report predicted that at a warming trend of 3.6 degrees Farenheit — now considered almost unavoidable, due to the greenhouse gases already emitted into the atmosphere — could put up to 30% of species on the planet at risk for extinction. A warming trend of 3 degrees would puts millions of human beings at risk from flooding, wetlands would be lost and there would be a massive die-off of sea corals. Sea levels would rise by 28 to 43 cm, and most frightening of all, the report acknowledged the possibility that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which would release enough fresh water to swamp coastal cities, could occur over centuries, rather than millennia. “If you add to this the melting of some of the ice bodies on Earth, this gives a picture of the kinds of issues we are likely to face,” said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chairman.

As if the potential consequences of climate change weren’t scary enough, the IPCC emphasized just how little time we have left to try to change the future. The panel reported that the world would have to reverse the rapid growth of greenhouse gases by 2015 to avert the worst consequences. The clock was running. “What we will do in the next two, three years will determine our future,” said Pachauri. “This is the defining challenge.”http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1685199,00.html

“The Project on Climate Science, a coalition of environmental groups, publicized the report in advance of Earth Day on April 22, a spokeswoman said. The report was released with little fanfare on April 7 and posted on the Federal Register on April 8.

The report, a draft of the Fifth U.S. Climate Action Report that will be sent to the United Nations, says bluntly: “Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced … Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.”http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/20/us-climate-usa-idUSTRE63F2Q520100420

“Just the Facts” I like your mission! I missed explicit mention of the link between lithosphere and atmosphere through limestone deposition. We know subduction drives volcanism, but what drives subduction rates?

Steven Mosher: I generally agree with your comments – but I’m with Wermet here. Earth’s climate is clearly driven by fluid dynamics, in the atmosphere – the oceans and within the mantle. Not only that, there is layer on layer of complexity within that dynamic system: the chemistry, the physical processes. If fluid dynamics was so great in a model, no one would need full-size wind-tunnels to make racing cars or aircraft. How is there any point worrying about the detail (radiative impacts of CO2) if you can’t get the basic transport right (and there are a lot of transport processes you need to get right if you are forecasting 50 years into the future!).

As others’ have taken issue with you already: the line that has made it through to the general populace who know little of the science is EXACTLY that CO2 is the only villain (and there’s no point debating otherwise). Now if those noble folk at AGU DON’T think that too, they are beholden to the public to make a bit more of a fuss.

I don’t doubt for one moment that most of those at AGU are sincere in their desire to understand Earth’s physical processes better. Earth is a fantastic system, and well worth studying. My objection is that study should take it’s place at the funding pot with all the other fields of science; not scamper onto the next hot topic leaving a trail of half-finished experiments and semi-finished theories and very little conclusion in it’s wake. The more complex the problem, surely the more systematic we should be in trying to solve it? I could be wrong, but I don’t see the systematic, transparent review and assimilation in climate science that you get in mature sciences like chemistry, geology, mathematics and physics or even medicine. That’s why I think Just the Facts aims are noble.

So why would it be that so many of those involved in real climate science are unwilling to publicise the uncertainty and the complexity and (largely) silently endorse the CAGW line? The obvious answer is: because it suits them, because they are dependent on the funding, and that funding is dependent on the problem being real and significant and urgent. It’s not necessarily corruption – though it is certainly fertile grounds for that, it is simple common sense. Unfortunately that ‘common-sense’ is leading to the very real debate around the policy response to a spectre of CAGW when it’s obvious to anyone without a vested interest that government market subsidisation to cut small amounts of anthropogenic CO2 is pointless. I very strongly resent paying a tax for that.

Excellent post, what a great list. As a practicing Engineer who does work with a closed system, water piping networks, I’ve always been fascinated by those in the climate field who can claim such accuracies with something that is obviously so chaotic. The accuracy for which the climate alarmist crowd purport is beyond hubris, IMHO.

“My two cents: the measured temperatures on land drop dramatically when a mass of still air, with low humidity, forms and remains in place for many hours. This is especially true when this occurs overnight. We see temperatures drop into the low 30s and high 20s (in degrees F) even during non-winter periods. This might be already included in the above list, I didn’t see it.”

Roger is referring to strong radiative cooling events, of the kind that typically occurs in dry desert conditions at night. But it can also occur in temperate climates. Records are kept regarding the high to low temperature range within a 24 hour period. Some of those records indicate a cooling of 70 degrees within a 24 hour period. These radiative events occur under certain conditions (pressure systems combined with low water vapor/relative humidity, no clouds, etc) and minimally last for around 12 hours, but can also extend themselves into many days. It can be a geographical local, or regional event. It is assumed the heat rises to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and eventually into space.

NE Oregon (a mix of desert, high plains, and temperature forest zones) experiences these events several times a year, and can happen in any season.

A temperature inversion is different. This is when two pressure systems collide and a warm air blanket that does not rise keeps cold air at ground level. The warmer air is still there, but you have to travel up in elevation to experience it. It takes quite a lot of energy to sweep an inversion away as it can be quite stable. Strong radiative events are like taking the blanket away, which allows warm air to quickly escape into the upper atmosphere and eventually to space, leaving a cold air column behind it. These events are unstable compared to inversions.

To the list in section 9. Albedo, I would add plants.
Over the course of a year, plants change, which in turn affects the albedo in the region containing the plants. Additionally, any changes to climate are going to affect what plants grow in a region, which will in turn affect the average albedo of that region.

None of those claims are overprecise. The TIME quote uses “trend in a funny way, but you are passing the facts through the belly of journalists. What do you expect? While the calls to action may be debatable, the supporting facts should not be controversial. The likelihood that anthropogenic forcing is somehow disconnected from recent climate change is small enough at this this point as to be negligible.

This is not an overprecise claim. It may once have been overconfident, but the evidence keeps piling up. Exactly how absurd a scenario do you need before neglecting it as irrational? “The community could not refute that somehow the radiative properties of emissions that pass through industrial processes selectively have no radiative effect thanks to the diligent work of leprechauns, but nevertheless the lower atmosphere warmed, the stratosphere cooled, the subtropics expanded, the hydrological cycle accelerated and most of the ice retreated coincidentally.”

None of the quotations you provided are anything to the effect “that we understand Earth’s climate system, are able to accurately measure its behavior, eliminate all potential variables except CO2 as the primary driver of Earth’s temperature and make predictions of Earth’s temperature decades into the future, all with a high degree of confidence.”

This is as far as I’d be willing to go in that direction: although, on a century time scale, I think it is arguable that we do indeed understand the climate system well enough to make global scale anomaly predictions within a factor of two, and some qualitative regional scale predictions with confidence. Perhaps *you* don’t understand it that well. Maybe if you didn’t try to swallow it all in one gulp it would go down easier.

The alarmists are making the claim that CO2 is big enough to worry about based on the claim that there are no other known mechanism that could have caused the warming of the last 100 years, therefore CO2 caused it.

This post is just further evidence that this belief is not justified. It also puts a bullet between the eyes (oh no, did I just make a death threat?) of the claim that we can believe the output of the models because they account for everything.

Michael Tobis says:“[…]the stratosphere cooled, the subtropics expanded, the hydrological cycle accelerated and most of the ice retreated coincidentally.”

The lower stratosphere cooled in two steps after El Chichon and Pinatubo (see my post above), which makes it hard to use that cooling as an argument for the CAGW message.
Regarding the hydrological cycle: Do you know if there are any publicly available plotted time series of tropospheric water vapor? I can’t find any.

I’ve tried to explain the complexity of climate by referencing what I call the 5 spheres

biosphere
hydrosphere
atmosphere
lithosphere
cryosphere

This alone defines 10 interfaces between the 5 spheres. And that doesn’t include interactions within each sphere. Everyone of these areas of interaction is known poorly at best, yet a solid understanding of all of them is vital in order to make predictions regarding the climate.

Follow the link to the abstract and click on the pdf link. The authors demonstrate that strong radiative cooling events are measureable factors in the energy balance and should be considered in models.

How far life extends downwards towards the core of the earth remains unknown to science. Likely much further than most scientists assume, because each time life is found deeper within the earth it is reported as a surprise. As though life would not evolve to take advantage of any energy source, and thereby modify the climate of the planet.

It is quite possible that life exists as deep within the planet as does water, which is also unknown. Recent evidence suggests that subduction carries water much deeper into the mantle than previously thought. That there may be more water buried within the earth than all the oceans combined.

This would mean that the current model of sea level rise is incomplete, or even wrong. That the ocean basins are not “containers” for the oceans. Simply low lying spots where the water within the earth is exposed.

As happens everywhere else on earth,when the water table is higher than the land, a body of water forms. The oceans may simply reflect the global height of the global water table. The ocean basins themselves do not “contain” the water, they are simply low spots in the crust below the global water table, where the water within the crust is exposed.

What is interesting is the production of methane deep within the earth. While mainstream science believes methane is a fossil fuel, and thereby limited in supply, there is a considerable body of evidence that methane is much more abundant than provided for by this theory.

Jeff Larson: turnover of CO2. Yes, I have had a go. By studying the gradients of annual downticks in CO2 in the Mauna Loa record (due the Northern Hemisphere growing season) I have derived a rate of exponential decay and consequent half-life. It comes out at 122 +/-2 months. (Peak rate of decline is between July and August.) Lock the Earth in August configuration and Bob’s yer uncle… CO2 will go down. (Note to geoengineering freaks: this is irony. Don’t go there.)

What triggered this effort was an outrageous statement on the UK Royal Society’s website (now withdrawn) that manmade CO2 stays in the atmosphere for over a thousand years. That “great sucking sound” every northern summer belies it.

To calculate that rate of takeup in tonnes per day is pretty straightforward, and it can be compared to the estimated rate of manmade contributions. If the manmade figure is comparatively tiny, it can still be argued (not by me) that the cumulative effect of MMCO2 is key, disrupting a (ficticious) natural balance. There’s evidence of a 900-year time lag between temperature and CO2 (CO2 variations being an effect, not a driver of natural temperature changes). The most convincing proxy for global temperature I know of is the 3500 year record of the Aletsch Glacier. It shows a warming from c1120AD to c1240. If today’s rise in CO2 is a delayed degassing, then in a few decades the Mauna Loa graph will peak and then decline. Now THAT would deprive the greenshirts of their favourite guilt trip… if Maunder II hasn’t already trashed their cherished global warming myth!

@- Richard M says:
July 1, 2011 at 8:07 am
“So, you believe “it’s the Sun”? Or are you stating CO2 changes over 6 months accounts for the changes? Oh wait, you are trying to equate “weather” with “climate”. Isn’t that interesting.”

Okay fair point, if you restrict ‘climate’ to changes in the the average of temperature, rainfall, humidity, snowcover, ice extent, glacier mass balance etc over a >30 yr period then seasonal changes are certainly NOT climate.

I am not sure many people attribute the difference between summer and winter as just ‘weather’ though…

The point I was trying to make, perhaps too obscurely, was that this list of factors, although extensive, does not include some very important factors because it seems to be unconnected with any sense of the relative magnitude, timescale and importance of the factors.
The distribution of sunlight over the surface is not only responsible for the seasons, but is also the trigger factor for the last ~3million years for the end of glacial periods as spring snow cover gets more readily melted in the N hemisphere when the Milankovitch cycle alters that distribution of sunlight.
Just as the seasons change when the distribution of sunlight alters.

A list like this is scientifically useless unless it is grounded in actual climate changes and what DOES cause them.
Other posters have compared this to the complexity of human biology and the problems in medicine.
If a patient presents with a number of signs and symptoms consulting a VERY long list of all the things that might affect the health of the individual is pointless. And human biology is FAR more complex than the climate.

What is done is to look at what has been found to cause those symptoms before and use them as a fingerprint to prepare a much shorter list with various levels of probability of the known causes of similar cases. Past research into the epidemiology of a disease. and what IS known about the biology of illness has discovered what causes a particular set of symptoms.

The methodology of research into complex and often chaotic systems – of which human health is one of the most difficult – is to approach it from the end of the effects and then look for the causes.
Not to make a long and exhaustive list of possible causes with no distinction as to magnitude or timescale and then claim that in the
face of such complexity any conclusions are impossible.

If the patient presents with raised a raised temperature and further investigation reveals an abnormally raised level of CO2 with predicted changes in the surface emissions and downwelling long wave radiation over less than a century you have a ‘fingerprint’ of a condition that eliminates most of the long all-inclusive list of possible causes.

Espen has eyeballed a complex graph (a more detailed reference would help; there’s no information as to what time series that is or whether it constitutes published data) and applied an informal interpretation to it. My strong expectation is you can’t get anything remotely resembling statistical significance for your interpretation. An alternative view is that there is some slight overshoot in recovery from a volcanic event for some reason, and that is all superimposed on a trend. It would be very hard on a record of that duration to make the distinction: you only have two events after all. Indeed, you’d have to make some very rigorous physical (non-statistical) characterizations of the signal to have any hope of getting anything beyond the trend out.

Regarding the other question, it is important to understand that atmospheric column moisture and the hydrological cycle are different things. Both are expected to increase, but there is no elementary guarantee that they are tightly correlated with each other. For moisture I come up with Trenberth, K. E., J. Fasullo, and L. Smith (2005), Trends and variability in column-integrated atmospheric water vapor, Clim. Dyn., 24, 741–758. For precipitation/evaporation there is Zhou et al, Recent trends of the tropical hydrological cycle inferred from Global Precipitation Climatology Project and International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project data, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 116, D09101, 16 PP., 2011 doi:10.1029/2010JD015197.

As proof that scientists are not PR professionals, I also offer you Kevin Trenberth’s visually hideous PDF on these subjects. http://www.agci.org/dB/PPTs/04S2_KTrenberth_0713.pdf It otherwise looks very solid. One might wish to have the audio for some parts. Please note especially the slide called “a conundrum” (the 15th I think). This is a succinct statement of mainstream science about anticipated precipitation changes, and it stands alone without the audio well enough.

For people trying to equate the human body’s complexity to climate, stop it. You don’t know anything that you’re talking about.

Unlike climate, we’ve learned a great deal about the human body through centuries of direct experimentation. Something we cannot do with the earth system.

The human body is also not nearly as complex. We also know the human body intimately through many layers of detail (through direct experimentation) from the humeral scale down to the molecular scale. And yet, even so, we are constantly discovering errors and problems. Why do medicines all have long lists of side effects? Why are some people allergic to penicillin and not others? Or some foods? Or some creams? Or sunlight? Or to themselves? Why have theories, we know what’s acting during the disease states, but we have no idea how they begin, what triggers them, or how to cure them. And here we are talking about a system which we can manipulate every known variable, through DNA and chemicals and surgery, directly however we wish, and have been for centuries!

No, climate is vastly more complex than this, and yet one would claim we could understand that well enough to base governmental and world policies on that’ll tax, radically change, and effect the lives of billions for generations to come? All while we still know so little about the human body that we can never make a medicine with no side effects? Can’t stop aging? Can’t cure cancer? Can’t stop the generation of super bugs? Can’t prevent death?

Right. You people amuse me in your self imposed naiveties.

The reason this topic is so heated, isn’t because of the science, it’s because of the politics that threaten to destroy our economies and our futures based on nothing we even begin to understand. Just computer models, all already failing as time moves on and temperatures don’t rise nearly as fast as they predicted.

“Mark Wilson says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:07 am
UV creates ozone, which is a GHG”
The feedback from that due to the solar cycle change in spectoral content modulating the atmospheric content would have the opposite sign to a modulation of Methane in the greenhouse effect. They would be antiphase with each other. Heat produced directly (not via the greenhouse feedback) would be in phase.
Does anyone know if the UV spectoral change is in time with the 11 year cycle or is it the 22,33,wolf/gleissberg etc?
Do the Ozone holes give the clue or are they electricaly related to the cycles more than UV related? .

“Jeff Larson says:
July 1, 2011 at 8:10 am
Has anyone estimated the volume of CO2 intake of the biosphere? If the “turnover” of CO2 is high, then it would cast doubt on AGW caused CO2 increase.”
Hope you get a better answer but I got curious about the change in the CO2 growth rate some years compared to others and had an amateurish play with correlations in various data sets to see what might influence this.
Khwarizmi above linked to something with “phytoplankton account for 50 percent of photosynthesis” i found something else that said 90 percent of all photosynthesis was in the oceans. So compared various SST data sets with CO2 growth rate changes. I got the strongest correlation between Both the annual change in CO2 and the non annual change in CO2 between this: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/oni.ascii.txt
and this: ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt
Table of three month SST compared to 7 month season corr CO2 change over the entire data sets.
seemed to show a correlation of SST to atmospheric CO2 with a 2 month delay( r0.5). That is temp first is followed by CO2 change.
Note the season corr CO2 value has not risen since Jan 2011.

Congratulations on a brilliant and through list, and a second congrats to all the posters here with more feedback and references.
Much appreciated, and I can tell you this page is already bookmarked for further late-night reading, ( along with the murder mysteries currently on my nightstand as well ).
This list would make a great reference page. Well done!

Feht: “IPCC does NOT take into account most of the influence factors and feedback mechanisms listed above.”

You can provide examples, then? “Most” would require a lot of work. Let’s start with a more manageable three. Identify how they operate on policy time scales and in what context IPCC ought to have included them but didn’t.

I congratulate you for apparently knowing the IPCC reports so thoroughly that you can come to the conclusion that “most” of these items are omitted so immediately. So if your claim is not completely fabricated, you should have little problem coming up with details in a few cases.

Ged says:
July 1, 2011 at 9:59 am
“The human body is also not nearly as complex. We also know the human body intimately … Why have theories, we know what’s acting during the disease states, but we have no idea how they begin, what triggers them, or how to cure them.”

So no point in accessing any treatment in the event of injury or disease ?
sarc/off

But you seem to suggest that if human biology is less complex than the climate, and known in much greater detail BUT we still have no idea about important aspects of it then the climate would be even less knowable?

This would be an appeal to permanent ignorance of the subject unless you have a suggestion for a means of dispelling it with research. Can you suggest a better approach than to look at the effects and track back to causes?

Perhaps this is the point of an exhaustive list of causal factors at all levels of the total climate system. If you observe an effect, then you can look through a list of possible causes and determine which could, and could not, be contributing to the observations.

Michael Tobis says:July 1, 2011 at 8:32 am
Espen has eyeballed a complex graph (a more detailed reference would help; there’s no information as to what time series that is or whether it constitutes published data) and applied an informal interpretation to it.

I’m surprised you need an explanation for that, the URL should tell you right away that I linked directly to Remote Sensing Systems.

An alternative view is that there is some slight overshoot in recovery from a volcanic event for some reason, and that is all superimposed on a trend. It would be very hard on a record of that duration to make the distinction: you only have two events after all.

There was also Agung in 1963, but the stratospheric temperature records start just a couple of years before that, so I guess it’s hard to tell if there was a step cooling after the warming from Agung.

You write as if the step cooling is something I just “eyeballed”, but of course it’s not, it has been observed by climate scientists and discussed in several papers, e.g. Thompson and Solomon (2008): “Understanding Recent Stratospheric Climate Change”.

There are quite a few overlaps between your list and mine:
(taken from a post trying to demonstrate the constructive and destructive interferences patterns on each other: http://cultofthecarboncow.com/?p=2001)

What are some of the climate variables a simple man from Kansas is aware of:

* Slight changes in the distance of the Earth from the Sun as the Sun’s gravity well drags the Earth about the cosmos
* Slight changes in Earth’s position within the plane of the ecliptic as the Sun’s gravity well drags the Earth about the cosmos
* Slight changes in the Solar System’s location within the galactic plane as the galaxy’s gravity well drags the Solar System about the cosmos
* Slight changes in the Sun’s intensity
* Slight changes in the relationship between the tilt of the Earth/Moon system’s gravitational axis and the Sun’s equator where the Sun’s magnetic disturbance and thus solar flares are greatest
* Slight changes in cloud cover caused by infrequent cosmic ray activity
* Slight changes in cloud cover caused by precipitation changes
* Slight changes in cloud cover due to changes in the jet stream and other wind patterns
* Slight changes in wind patterns due to slight changes in the height of mountain ranges due to plate tectonics
* Slight changes in wind patterns due to slight changes in the depths of valleys as running rivers erode the Earth
* Slight changes in precipitation on land due to changing wind patterns alternating whether rain is deposit on land or sea
* Slight changes in atmospheric gas concentrations
* The occasional eruption of volcanoes on land
* The occasional eruption of volcanoes under the sea
* The continuous belching forth of our planet’s innards upon itself along the ocean ridges
* Slight changes in the width of the ocean’s ridges, reducing or increasing the resistance to the release of gasses
* Slight changes to the amount of continental plates as they subduct or grow, or perhaps slightly expand the volume of the planet
* Slight changes in magmatic patterns within the mantle
* Slight changes in the drift of the core
* Slight changes in land use patterns (the changes in the amount of land dedicated to farming, forestry, cities, etc.)
* Slight changes in the amount of methane welling up from the ocean’s floors
* Slight changes to the reflectivity of the Earth (albedo) as plants grow and cast shadows and then die, and as buildings are built or destroyed, and as natural occurrences darken or lighten waters
* Slight changes in albedo due to changing ice patterns
* Slight changes in the Earth’s magnetic field that allow or disallow a varying amount of cosmic rays and solar radiation into the atmosphere
* Slight changes to the Sun’s magnetic field
* The occasional earthquake
* The occasional meteor strike
* The continuous depositing on the Earth of the Solar System’s dust that becomes trapped in the gravity well of the Earth
* Slight changes to the ratio between the volume of plant matter (respirators of oxygen) to animal matter (respirators of carbon dioxide)
* Slight changes to the production of energy by mankind

Each of the above, and I am sure there are many more, would have their own curve representing their contribution to Earth’s climate. None of the curves are likely the simple sine waves this post has presented, and to make the point again: each of the above would have to be evaluated against each of the other to properly account for the constructive and destructive influence each would have on the climate.

Further, and more to the point of this post: each of the above have different times between the repetition of their patterns, for those that are not one-offs. The varying durations (periods) of the curves, the varying shapes of the curves, the varying intensity (amplitudes) of the curves, and the varying amount of interference due to the current presence or non-presence of each of the above plus all the actual climatic influences makes for a natural yet chaotic climate system.

While I continue to object to the “stair-step” characterization, I acknowledge that others have used it. I thank Espen for raising an interesting issue. I withdraw and apologize for my offhand dismissal of it.

They say: “In contrast to the relatively unchanging expectations of surface and tropospheric warming primarily induced by greenhouse gas increases, stratospheric temperature change
expectations have arisen from experiments with a wider variety of model types, showing more complex trend patterns associated with a greater diversity of forcing agents.” That said, at first glance their figure 5 seems to indicate that long-lived greenhouse gas forcing dominates the observed trends.

..Linsky says we’ll enter the G cloud in less than 5,000 years — perhaps even tomorrow.
Once that happens, there’s a chance the G cloud will affect the Sun’s solar wind and Earth’s climate.

For instance, a dense enough cloud could push in on the solar wind and pollute the interplanetary medium, decreasing the Sun’s intensity and cooling the Earth. A very dense cloud could even produce an ice age on the Earth. Luckily, the G cloud isn’t dense enough to cause an ice age. It would only cool the earth a little relative to the environment we’re in now. Still, Linsky says, it’s only a matter of time until we encounter a cloud that is dense enough to radically alter our climate.

Accretion of,
Helium
Hydrogen
Carbon
Oxygen
Dust
etc..etc..
Good to see also you had mention of Interstellar Magnetic Fields, like the one they think is denting the heliosphere bubble in the nose.
sshh don’t tell Dr. S.. eeee

False assumption, therefore the incorrect conclusion is not surprising.

The UN/IPCC’s unsupportable guesstimate of CO2 residence time is contradicted by numerous peer reviewed studies. Further, the effect of adding more CO2 diminishes rapidly, thus debunking the Malthusian arm-waving over a minor trace gas which, even if it doubled, is still a minor trace gas.

Well, sure, there are lots of influences. The point is that a few of them are very very very very large compared to the others, those are all anthropogenic, and the CO2 eventually dominates because it has such a long residence time that it is essentially cumulative and (without a huge expensive and energy-intensive intervention that more than obviates its advantages in the first place) essentially irreversible.

There are many influences on my health, and the biological system is far from being perfectly characterized, but getting swatted on the skull daily by a growing child wielding a baseball bat is still a very bad idea that gets worse with each passing day.

They are not my graphs, and they are graphs based on numerous peer reviewed studies, as anyone looking at them would see. And:

“If CO2 perturbation decay time were short, CO2 concentrations would go down during a recession.”

If Tobis took the time to notice, he would see that the rise in [harmless, beneficial] CO2 has been stagnant since the beginning of the year.

I don’t make these comments to educate Michael Tobis, whose mind is closed as tight as Harold Camping’s, and who cannot be educated with facts. I note these facts only to avoid allowing others to be swayed by bogus alarmist propaganda. Malthusian Luddites like Tobis have been arm-waving for centuries, and they have been wrong for centuries. They are just as mistaken today.

UPDATED: This list has undergone significant revisions and improvements based upon crowdsourcing the input of an array of very intelligent and knowledgeable contributors below. Additionally, this list was posted in comments in WUWT a few times previously, receiving input from a number of other very intelligent and knowledgeable contributors. This thread, along with links to the precursor threads below, will thus serve as the bibliography for the WUWT Potential Climatic Variables reference page (unless someone can up with a better name for it…)

Please let me know if you have any suggested improvements to this intro paragraph… :)

“Over the course of a year the average solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 1,366 watts per square meter[2][3] (see solar constant). The radiant power is distributed across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, although most of the power is in the visible light portion of the spectrum. The Sun’s rays are attenuated as they pass though the atmosphere, thus reducing the insolation at the Earth’s surface to approximately 1,000 watts per square meter for a surface perpendicular to the Sun’s rays at sea level on a clear day.

The actual figure varies with the Sun angle at different times of year, according to the distance the sunlight travels through the air, and depending on the extent of atmospheric haze and cloud cover. Ignoring clouds, the average insolation for the Earth is approximately 250 watts per square meter (6 (kW·h/m2)/day), taking into account the lower radiation intensity in early morning and evening, and its near-absence at night.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation

What Anthropogenic forces can you point to that are “very very very very large compared to the” “average insolation for the Earth” i.e., “approximately 250 watts per square meter (6 (kW·h/m2)/day)”?

People like Michael Tobis do not want to see facts. They only throw unsubstantiated accusations and inane party line cliche’s. And rationality is the last thing in the world you can expect from them. Look at all his posts in this thread. Entirely devoid of any rationale or facts.

It’s good that you put up these counter arguments with facts which will show every time to every one as to how shallow and devoid of facts arguments of such people are.

A couple of major factors such as solar and oceanic variability would pretty much swamp everything else with all the lesser factors simply offsetting each other on average over time.

Would it be possible to rank the various items and processes on the list in order of significance or perhaps group them in batches of compareable magnitudes?

I am open to a Significant Climatic Influences page, and/or a Significant Temperature Influences page, I like the variable batches of comparable magnitudes. Does anyone want try to build one?

In practice I think the climate system is more simple than such a list suggests because of the primacy of a small number of major factors.

I disagree. You seem to be focused on a singular subject, i.e. the “small number of major” influences on Earth’s temperature, whereas, the ridiculous complexity is especially apparent when you try to imagine the entire beast in motion.

The question is variability on the time scale of the anthropogenic CO2 perturbation, which could drive climate *change*. As far as I know, nothing in the published literature indicates anything larger than 0.3 W/m^2 peak-to-peak solar variability on decadal-to-century time scales. Compare 4 w/m^2 imbalance for an instantaneous CO2 doubling or equivalent, and you have the generally accepted conclusion that human inputs already overcome the solar variability.

As noted in my update to the intro this post/list, previously I posted this list in comments of several WUWT threads, linked below) and got some valuable input from a number of individuals. This comment serves as a continuation of the bibliography.

To continue the human body analogy:
While we know a lot about the human body, we still don’t know a great deal. With our current understanding of genetics, brain functions, physiology, psychology, education, and group dynamics, can we predict what college your infant will go to with any level of certainty? Or for that matter, what you will want to eat for breakfast next Tuesday?
You may counter that we don’t know if you will want bacon and eggs or cereal, but we know that if you eat a lot you will get fat. However, we don’t really understand why you get fat and I don’t when we eat the same amount and do the same activity. We may recognize it happens, but not understand the dynamics of why. And on it goes.
REALLY complex systems are even harder to predict than they are to understand. Inability to grasp how all the small scale influences affect the larger scale is problematic, regardless of the time scale, but a show stopper in any long-term time scale.

Thank you for a useful and interesting post. Implicit in the discussion of ‘AGW’, ‘Climate Change’ et seq, and in the various actions proposed, is the belief that human actions can exacerbate or mitigate climate and it’s various effects on a global scale. And by extension, weather.
Many people, myself included, find this assumption that we are able to control or influence global climate, dubious at best.

Wow. Tobis has deigned to post on WUWT, many times on this thread, in a manner resembling an arguing of the facts.

What’s happening? Is traffic so low on his blog that he’s trawling for some visits with all the links to his site? Or is he trying to improve a Wikio-type link-based rating by liberally spreading them on this much more well read blog? According to this web site stat page, WUWT has the highest Alexa ranking of any site linking to his blog, a very high 17,562 (lower is better) compared to his 811,560. And his traffic has been dropping like a stone…

@- justthefactswuwt says:
July 1, 2011 at 11:36 pm
“Do you agree that Oceanic Oscillations can have a significant influence on Earth’s Temperature?”

On the immediate temperature, but not on the climate.

There is little historical evidence that the pattern of Oscillations drives unidirectional climate change.
It is considered more likely they respond to, not initiate significant trends that extend beyond the average cycle length.

Do you just make this stuff up? You don’t seem to do the most basic fact checking. Search engines are your friend.
—————-

There may be a simple explanation why you are BOTH right.

The top of atmosphere variation is ~1.2 W/m2 or 0.1%.
The average surface change – because the Earth is a sphere and rotates is about a quarter of the top-of-atmosphere value, – around 0.3W/m2 or 0.1% of the surface average total.

Search engines can be our friend, but thinking about WHY two people come up with different results can also help.

You take the needle, bury it in the haystack, and then question whether there is a needle at all. If this defense works nobody will ever be able to make a case for anything.

/end quote

exactly the point. The needle makes NO observable difference to the haystack – which is why it is so hard to find. Nice analogy, demonstrating the probable impact of anthropological CO2 / other impacts on the global climate – although it is possible that it may underestimate the impact – maybe 10 needles (an order of magnitude) would be better

Izen, you are very mistaken about oceanic oscillations not being capable of driving unilateral “climate change”, which I wish you would use the more accurate “weather pattern variation” term. Google “Elk population and Oceanic Oscillations”, or any other marine/flora/fauna species. My ancestors down to the current crop have been farmers since before the Amercian Revolution. We know both short and long term weather pattern variation. Intimately.

Weather pattern variation change can be natural or anthropogenic, or both. But climate is defined by seasons and extremes. If seasons or extremes begin to show a consistent pattern of change to the point that a new zone designation is in order, then I will be more willing to accept climate change as a more accurate descriptor.

Let’s do the really long one first. The meridional overturning circulation. A super El Nino event warms a vast area of the Pacific as it sits idly in the lazy trade wind, soaking up the Sun, and leaving the cold waters underneath to sullenly sit there. Now set this warmed ocean into the overturning circulation. How many days, months, years, decades, or centuries does it take for this heated pool to make it round the circulation?

What? The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) “is a climate index based upon patterns of variation in sea surface temperature of the North Pacific from 1900 to the present (Mantua et al. 1997). While derived from sea surface temperature data, the PDO index is well correlated with many records of North Pacific and Pacific Northwest climate and ecology, including sea level pressure, winter land–surface temperature and precipitation, and stream flow. The index is also correlated with salmon landings from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California.

The PDO is highly correlated with sea surface temperature in the northern California Current (CC) area; thus we often speak of the PDO as being in one of two phases, a “warm phase” and a “cool phase,” according to the sign of sea–surface temperature anomalies along the Pacific Coast of North America. ”http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/fed/oeip/ca-pdo.cfm

i.e. there was a warming period from 1910 to 1945, a cooling period from 1945 – 1975, a warming period from 1975 to 2005 and we may now be in the early days of a cooling period due to a 30 year Cold Regime in the PDO.

The average surface change – because the Earth is a sphere and rotates is about a quarter of the top-of-atmosphere value, – around 0.3W/m2 or 0.1% of the surface average total.

No. Michael Tobis wrote that, “nothing in the published literature indicates anything larger than 0.3 W/m^2 peak-to-peak solar variability on decadal-to-century time scales.” and he is wrong. The variation in Total Solar Irradiance is measured at the “outer surface of Earth’s atmosphere”;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation

i.e. look at the measurement data:

Thus all of the “literature” references these measurements, e.g. the paper “A new, lower value of total solar irradiance: Evidence and climate significance” by Kopp and Lean, 2011, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS:

“The most accurate value of total solar irradiance during the 2008 solar minimum period is 1360.8 ± 0.5 W m−2 according to measurements from the Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) on NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) and a series of new radiometric laboratory tests. This value is significantly lower than the canonical value of 1365.4 ± 1.3 W m−2 established in the 1990s, which energy balance calculations and climate models currently use. Scattered light is a primary cause of the higher irradiance values measured by the earlier generation of solar radiometers in which the precision aperture defining the measured solar beam is located behind a larger, view-limiting aperture. In the TIM, the opposite order of these apertures precludes this spurious signal by limiting the light entering the instrument. We assess the accuracy and stability of irradiance measurements made since 1978 and the implications of instrument uncertainties and instabilities for climate research in comparison with the new TIM data. TIM’s lower solar irradiance value is not a change in the Sun’s output, whose variations it detects with stability comparable or superior to prior measurements; instead, its significance is in advancing the capability of monitoring solar irradiance variations on climate-relevant time scales and in improving estimates of Earth energy balance, which the Sun initiates.”http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010GL045777.shtml

How did you arrive at an “average surface change” of “around 0.3W/m2 or 0.1% of the surface average total”? Can you cite a source to support this assertion? Does this “average surface change” take into account clouds?

Actually compared to molecular biology the climate system looks ridiculously simple. It’s relatively easy to figure out energy flows in the climate system as it all boils down to thermodynamic laws of physics (entropy flows). There are just a number of subtle influences that are poorly understood (like GCR flux), a smaller number of major influences that are poorly understood (such as clouds), and an unknown number of things that might effect outcomes that we are unaware of. The resulting interplay of knowns, partially knowns, and unknowns on a global scale yields an intractible problem to solve. The best predictions remain in the realm of climatology i.e. past patterns used as predictors of future patterns.

Molecular biology is like climate science on steroids (pun intended) because in that realm it isn’t all just simple entropy flow but rather a hideously complex information system driving chemistry which keeps normal entropy flow in check long enough for the system to reproduce itself. Evidently it’s quite successful at defeating entropy if one accepts the notion that every living cell today has an unbroken lineage dating back to cells that were alive a few billion years ago. Perhaps the largest problem confronting molecular biology is why any of us are alive to think about it. Genetic entropy eventually kills all individuals if something else doesn’t kill them first. It eventually kills all species as well. Most cell lines eventually die off after an average of about 10 million years. The mystery is in how some rare cell lines manage to periodically reset the damage done by genetic entropy and thus persist for billions of years. Every cell in your body is one of those rare lineages that managed to reset the timer on the genetic entropy bomb. Every living cell on the planet is one of those rare few.

justthefactswuwt
PDO and ENSO indices are the ‘highly correlated’ ones.
Above quoted Dr Mantua also states:At the time of this writing, causes for (and predictability limits of) the PDO are not known. What is known is that the nature of the mechanisms giving rise to the PDO will determine whether or not it is possible to make decade-long PDO climate predictions.http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~mantua/REPORTS/PDO/PDO_cs.htm

In my investigations I found a natural process (not climate dependent) operating in the general area of the North Pacific, with a reasonable correlation to the PDOhttp://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PDO.htm
with power and ability to affect ocean currents and atmospheric pressure. In its nature it is an exact equivalent of the process driving NAO (N.Atlantic Oscillation)http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NAO-.htm

“The White Cliffs of Dover are cliffs which form part of the British coastline facing the Strait of Dover and France. The cliffs are part of the North Downs formation. The cliff face, which reaches up to 107 metres (351 ft),[1] owes its striking façade to its composition of chalk (pure white calcium carbonate) accentuated by streaks of black flint.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Cliffs_of_Dover

Given the small geographic coverage and orientation to the sun, White Cliffs of Dover would seem to have an extremely small, if any, influence on Earth’s Climate System.

Carrera Marble;

“Marble is a rock resulting from metamorphism of sedimentary carbonate rocks, most commonly limestone or dolomite rock. Metamorphism causes variable recrystallization of the original carbonate mineral grains.

The resulting marble rock is typically composed of an interlocking mosaic of carbonate crystals. Primary sedimentary textures and structures of the original carbonate rock (protolith) have typically been modified or destroyed.

Pure white marble is the result of metamorphism of a very pure (silicate-poor) limestone or dolomite protolith. The characteristic swirls and veins of many colored marble varieties are usually due to various mineral impurities such as clay, silt, sand, iron oxides, or chert which were originally present as grains or layers in the limestone.”

“Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock normally occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure. Coal is composed primarily of carbon along with variable quantities of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, with smaller quantities of sulfur, oxygen and nitrogen.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal

“Methane is a chemical compound with the chemical formula CH4. It is the simplest alkane, and the principal component of natural gas. Methane’s bond angles are 109.5 degrees (cos−1(−1/3)). Burning methane in the presence of oxygen produces carbon dioxide and water. The relative abundance of methane makes it an attractive fuel. However, because it is a gas at normal temperature and pressure, methane is difficult to transport from its source. It is generally transported in bulk by pipeline in its natural gas form, or LNG carriers in its liquefied form; few countries transport it by truck.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane

Fossil Fuels, good one! And this suggestion, along with your next one have precipitated the creation of a new category i.e. “11. Chemical” including Fossil Fuels:
Coal
Oil shale
Petrochemicals
– Petroleum
– Mineral Oil
Asphalt
Tar Pits/Sands
Methane

forest fires (it’s live stuff that burns)

This is another good one, i.e. Combustion. Added under new category 11. Chemical – Reactions.

I am surprised justthefactswuwt doesn’t know how to convert TSI to global-average solar input. First you take a quarter of 1350 which is about 340 W/m2 which is the average value at the top of the atmosphere (see Kiehl and Trenberth energy diagram). Then you multiply by 0.7 which takes into account albedo to get the amount absorbed by the earth system, which leaves 240 W/m2. So the 0.1% variation of that is about 0.24 W/m2 as Tobis and izen say. This is the number to compare with 4 W/m2 forcing from doubling CO2.

@-justthefactswuwt says:
July 2, 2011 at 7:11 am
“What is unidirectional climate change? Do you think that some portion of the increase in temperature between 1975 and 2005 might have been related to the PDO Warm Regime?”

Unidirectional climate change is driven by an energy imbalance. If the surface is consistently receiving less radiation than it is loosing to space then it cools until there is a close but dynamic balance between energy in and out.

The PDO phase may have been correlated with an increase in temperature between 1975 and 2005. But the 1LoT means it is restricted to energy storage, it can only affect the timing of any re-balancing of the energy budget.
Are you certain about the direction of causal relationship between a reified concept like the PDO and observational data?

“How did you arrive at an “average surface change” of “around 0.3W/m2 or 0.1% of the surface average total”? ”

Geometry.
The ‘top of atmosphere’ values are 1366 W/m2. with a 0.1% varience -~ 1.3W/m2

But the Earth surface is not a square metre, its a revolving sphere.
surface area of a disc = PIr2
Surface area of a sphere = 4PIr2

You are right that there is much in the literature that refers to the top of atmosphere figure, but it is most often qualified with the need to put it in context of the ACTUAL surface over which it falls.

It is fashionable to say the Earth’s climate system is “chaotic”, meaning that chaos theory applies. This is fashionable but untrue: chaos theory says that small perturbations in a complex system MAY have unforseen consequences. It does not say that there WILL be unforseen consequences.

As I detailed in a previous comment, geological history shows continuity with episodic shifts. Geologically this is called “punctuated equilibrium”. In a system that is truly ruled by chaos, the outcome, i.e. weather and climate, bounce around. Stability is only attained after a period of back-and-forths, until the controlling factor becomes well established. The Earth shows long periods in which the climate is cold or hot, CO2 rising after the warmth starts and going down after the cold starts. Regulatory systems are progressive, incremental and stable.

Schroninger’s cat may be confused about what might happen, and electrons may spin around the nucleus in a probabalistic way, but a herd of cats will surely swallow the inattentive bird and the baseball will land in the stands if hit in the right way. At a large scale the climate – like the cloud with its fractal topology – tends to observe the Laws of Momentum.

There are thresholds or tipping points in systems, obviously. Keystone species, once gone, like the buffalo or the Native Americans, show up as having has a huge impact on the biological systems around them. But biological systems feed by their nature on each other, and are therefore a bad analogy (though loved by the bio-philic, non-hard science warmist). The components of the atmosphere interact but don’t feed on each other. If, for example, CO2 were a keystone atmospheric element, a sudden kick into the atmosphere of huge amounts of it during the explosions Krakatoa or Tambora would have a long, solid and sustained effect on the planet. They do not have that impact. There is a sudden effect (cooling, actually) and then the previous style and detail of stability returns.

The world is indeed complex, as described. But most of them are like the passengers running around inside a train heading across the country. Regardless of the eating, drinking and fooling around in nefarious ways, the train is going to end up where it was originally headed for.

@- Doug Proctor says:
July 2, 2011 at 1:43 pm
“If, for example, CO2 were a keystone atmospheric element, a sudden kick into the atmosphere of huge amounts of it during the explosions Krakatoa or Tambora would have a long, solid and sustained effect on the planet. They do not have that impact. There is a sudden effect (cooling, actually) and then the previous style and detail of stability returns.”

The explosions Krakatoa or Tambora would have a long, solid and sustained effect on the planet IF they released significant amounts of CO2. The transient cooling effect is from the sulfur content of the erupted material. It alters albedo but has a short residence time.

Around 30 Gigatons of CO2 were released by buring fossil fuel in 2010.
The eruption of Tambora ejected an estimated 2 Gigatons of material in total. Krakatoa and Tambora were much smaller additions to the atmospheric CO2 than human activity.
You need something more like a Yellowstone super-volcano to erupt to exceed the annual contribution from anthropogenic sources.

“Solar” in the energy budget as the means of converting to heat the land and oceans of Earth refer to Visible and the two shortwaves either side, UV and Nr Ir. None of these is thermal, they are Light, not Heat. Heat is the thermal infrared we feel from the Sun, which is what warms us and the land and the oceans. We cannot feel Light as heat, because it’s not hot…

“Light”, “Solar”, “irradiance” cannot physically heat organic matter to create the AGWScience energy budget scenario. For example, light, the visible spectrum, is transmitted through water, it is not absorbed, it has no effect in water, it cannot heat it, water is transparent to visible light. The energy budget you all seem to be working to is a creation of AGWScience, not real world traditional science. Therefore, all your ‘calculations’ if you are using these figures are absolute nonsense. The AGWScience energy budget EXCLUDES thermal infrared.

Light energies should be properly described. That these are reflected, scattered, by the oxygen and nitrogen molecules of our atmosphere, which gives us our blue sky, transmitted through water, i.e. pass through, used in photosynthesis etc., are not thermal.

The Water Cycle – the link to the wiki page mentions, but a garbled sentence, that without the water cycle the Earth would be 67°C. This is the main greenhouse gas of the real greenhouse – our gaseous atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen. This is cooling the Earth, AGWScience has reversed that in its promotion of its meme that greenhouse gases ‘warm the earth’. Water vapour is lighter than air, it always therefore rises, water has a very high capacity to store heat, in the water cycle heat is taken up and away from the surface.

Carbon dioxide – the Carbon Cycle needs to be included properly. It is heavier than air, therefore will always sink displacing air unless some work done to move it upwards, such as wind (which is a volume of air on the move). When water and carbon dioxide meet, they merge, always. Carbon dioxide and water in the atmosphere meeting become carbonic acid. Rain is carbonic acid. Every time it rains the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is removed.

Carbon dioxide cannot accumulate in the atmosphere firstly because it is heavier than air so will always displace air and come to the ground unless something is moving it up, and all rain is carbonic acid, the natural wash cycle of the atmosphere which takes out dust and brings both water and carbon dixodide back to the ground where it is food for plant life and therefore for us; we are carbon life forms, 20% carbon, the rest mainly water. Plants take in carbon dioxide from the underside of their leaves , through stromata, except for such as water lilies which have their stromata on the top of the leaf. Carbon dioxide ‘accumulating’ in the atmosphere out of reach of ground level is physical nonsense, promoted by AGWScience against real traditional science.

“Acid rain, or acid precipitation, refers to any precipitation that is more acidic (i.e., has a lower pH value) than that of normal rainwater. Carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere makes all rain slightly acidic because carbon dioxide and water combine to form carbonic acid., commonly known as carbonated water.”

“…why not presume IPCC innocent, along with the Royal Academy, the NAS, the AAAS, the AGU, the EGU, etc. etc.?”

For one of two reasons: they’re either opaque like the UN/IPCC, or they do not allow their rank-and-file membership to challenge their official positions. There is a bunker mentality shared by all of them. There can be no presumption of innocence when these organizations have so much to hide. The correct presumption is that they have been hijacked by groups with a CAGW agenda.

Since there is zero evidence of CAGW, they appear to be corrupted by activists, who fear and detest scientific transparency. Particularly the IPCC, which is completely beyond redemption because they dance to the tune played by Greenpeace, the WWF, etc. Only the most hopelessly naive would give them any credence this late in the game.

“Michael Tobis finds a presumption of innocence to be a “peculiar” notion. No wonder he trusts the conclusions of an irresponsible and corrupt UN organization.”

The more I think about that one the more peculiar it gets. To make it explicit for those who don’t see the irony, why not presume IPCC innocent, along with the Royal Academy, the NAS, the AAAS, the AGU, the EGU, etc. etc.?

Can't have that, it would make things too easy for ordinary people with calculators to multiply the solar "constant" (which ain't) by the number of square meters in Earth's cross section, thereby coming up with the extremely large number of Watts with which to swat anyone who pooh-pooh's the solar variation's influence on the climate by saying "It only varies by 1.3 watts per square meter so that's nothing!". 1.3 watts of "nothing" times how many billion?

Well, for those not intent on being altogether silly, let me point out that Nobel chemist Mario Molina quoted on Shell scientist David Hone’s blog, thinks the whole business is pretty much cut and dry.

There’s also the briefest possible summary of the physics at that link. Those who don’t follow that are encouraged to keep digging at it until they do. Then maybe they can sensibly look for the more realistic approximation using calculus and multiple wavelengths, and then look into what it implies for our present circumstances.

But if you want to look into something else, maybe inertia-gravity waves or plate tectonics, first, have fun, but it won’t actually bear on the controversy very directly. Why not start where it starts and work from there?

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/solar/solarirrad.html <- One rather large problem there. The site is missing a number, the cross sectional area of Earth in square meters.
Can't have that, it would make things too easy for ordinary people with calculators to multiply the solar "constant" (which ain't) by the number of square meters in Earth's cross section, thereby coming up with the extremely large number of Watts with which to swat anyone who pooh-pooh's the solar variation's influence on the climate by saying "It only varies by 1.3 watts per square meter so that's nothing!". 1.3 watts of "nothing" times how many billion?
——————-

Ordinary people might know, or with present day education internet search, that the radius of the Earth is ~6,370km and the area of a circle is PIr2.
So the cross sectional area of Earth in square meters. is about –
127.5 thousand Billion square meters which at 1.3W/m2 gives ~
a little under 167 Thousand Billion Watts.

Of course the increased downwelling energy from the rising CO2 is also around 1.3W/m2
But that operates over the total surface area of the sphere of the Earth, or Four times the cross sectional area.
663 Thousand Billion Watts.

( I have a nagging suspicion that I may have dropped/gained a factor of ten somewhere I'd be happy to see someone check these figures!)

I am surprised justthefactswuwt doesn’t know how to convert TSI to global-average solar input. First you take a quarter of 1350 which is about 340 W/m2 which is the average value at the top of the atmosphere (see Kiehl and Trenberth energy diagram). Then you multiply by 0.7 which takes into account albedo to get the amount absorbed by the earth system, which leaves 240 W/m2. So the 0.1% variation of that is about 0.24 W/m2 as Tobis and izen say. This is the number to compare with 4 W/m2 forcing from doubling CO2.

According to PhysicalGeography.net, “as energy from the Sun passes through the atmosphere a number of things take place (see Figure 7h-1). A portion of the energy (26% globally) is reflected or scattered back to space by clouds and other atmospheric particles. About 19% of the energy available is absorbed by clouds, gases (like ozone), and particles in the atmosphere. Of the remaining 55% of the solar energy passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, 4% is reflected from the surface back to space. On average, about 51% of the Sun’s radiation reaches the surface. This energy is then used in a number of processes, including the heating of the ground surface; the melting of ice and snow and the evaporation of water; and plant photosynthesis.”http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7h.html

Based on these estimates, on average about 51% of the 1.3 Watts per square meter (W/m2) would reach the surface, thus on average .663 Watts per square meter (W/m2) of the energy would reach the surface.

I thought we had a consensus here, why is Trenberth’s estimate so much lower than the PhysicalGeography.net estimate?

Unidirectional climate change is driven by an energy imbalance. If the surface is consistently receiving less radiation than it is loosing to space then it cools until there is a close but dynamic balance between energy in and out.

This seems like a fuzzy construct, i.e. the direction varies based upon the structure of the imbalance.

The PDO phase may have been correlated with an increase in temperature between 1975 and 2005. But the 1LoT means it is restricted to energy storage, it can only affect the timing of any re-balancing of the energy budget.

Agreed, but there is a tremendous amount of energy stored in the oceans, e.g. “El Niño’s energy reserve is vast, almost inconceivable. It contains more energy than has been procured from all the fossil fuels burned in the United States since the beginning of the century – that’s all the gasoline in all the cars, the coal in all the power plants, the natural gas in all the furnaces. It would take more than a million large power plants, at 1,000 megawatts each, running full tilt for a year, to heat the ocean that much. Or if you want to think in more violent terms, that’s all the energy produced by about half a million 20 megaton hydrogen bombs, gone into heating water.”http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elnino/anatomy/origins.html

and said re-balancings have a major impact on Earth’s Climate and Temperature when they occur.

Are you certain about the direction of causal relationship between a reified concept like the PDO and observational data?

There seems to be reasonable support for it within the literature, e.g.;

“The signature of the PDO is clearly evident in the wintertime surface climate record for much of North America, but not for that of the other continents. The strongest coefficients of wintertime air temperature regressed upon the PDO index are located in northwestern North America ( Fig. 3a, cf. Latif and Barnett 1994 Fig. 5b), with local maxima of opposing centers over south central Alaska/western Canada and the southeastern United States. The PDO is positively correlated with wintertime precipitation along the coast of the central Gulf of Alaska and over northern Mexico and south Florida, and negatively correlated with that over much of the interior of North America and over the Hawaiian Islands.”http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~mantua/REPORTS/PDO/pdo_paper.html

“The North American climate anomalies associated with PDO warm and cool extremes are broadly similar to those connected with El Niño and La Niña (Latif and Barnett 1995, Latif and Barnett 1996, Zhang et al. 1997, Mantua et al. 1997). Warm phases of the PDO are correlated with North American temperature and precipitation anomalies similar to those correlated with El Niño (Figure 4): above average winter and spring time temperatures in northwestern North America, below average temperatures in the southeastern US, above average winter and spring rainfall in the southern US and northern Mexico, and below average precipitation in the interior Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions. Cool phases of the PDO are simply correlated with the reverse climate anomaly patterns over North America (not shown), broadly similar to typical La Niña climate patterns. The PDO-related temperature and precipitation patterns are also strongly expressed in regional snow pack and stream flow anomalies, especially in western North America (see Cayan 1995, Mantua et al. 1997, Bitz and Battisti 1999, Nigam et al. 1999). A summary of major PDO climate anomalies are listed in Table 1. ”http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~mantua/REPORTS/PDO/PDO_cs.htm

I wouldn’t say that I’m “certain”, but I am fairly confident the PDO influences Earth’s temperature in a similar manner as El Niño/La Niña does.

Geometry.
The ‘top of atmosphere’ values are 1366 W/m2. with a 0.1% varience -~ 1.3W/m2

But the Earth surface is not a square metre, its a revolving sphere.
surface area of a disc = PIr2
Surface area of a sphere = 4PIr2

What? Why? What role does Earth’s rotation, spherical shape and “Earth surface is not a square metre” play in the amount of solar radiation reaches the surface?

You are right that there is much in the literature that refers to the top of atmosphere figure

So you are agreeing that Michael Tobis’ statement that “nothing in the published literature indicates anything larger than 0.3 W/m^2 peak-to-peak solar variability on decadal-to-century time scales.” is in fact erroneous?

Michael Tobis – CFCs became a problem when the patent ran out. It can be difficult to grasp just how much misinformation is produced about our physical world by AGWScience, and for every statement made about any part of it a lot of aspects have to be looked at to realise, and to explain, just how corrupt, and deliberately so, the whole exercise is.

Carbon Dioxide ‘well-mixed’ and ‘accumulating in the atmosphere’ a case in point. I’ve given two real physical pieces of information which debunks this, (CO2 is heavier than the fluid gaseous atmosphere and so does not readily rise into the air, but will always spontaneously gravitate down to earth because it displaces the lighter nitrogen and oxygen molecules, whether one CO2 molecule or a whole bunch of them say from an erupting or venting volcano, and, that all rain is carbonic acid, that is, at cooler temperatures, carbon dioxide spontaneously combines with water so is being continually removed from the atmosphere in the Water Cycle). Another reason it is not well-mixed is that it is subject to the limitations of the movement of volumes of air, wind. Wind does not move from one hemisphere to the other, although there is some mixing at the equator the circulation patterns of wind, volumes of air moving, are limited to the hemisphere the volume is in. Basically, wind happens when volumes of air get hot, hot air rises because it is less dense than cold air and as it rises colder volumes of air above it move down below replacing the hotter air rising. Wind is not an invisible paddle stirring the atmosphere. The atmosphere is not in constant motion of ‘turbulence’ as AGWScience claims. Glacing outside, there is a little light breeze barely moving the tops of the tall trees around me, much of the time it is calm outdoors.

The other side to this is the reasons given by AGWScience by calling molecules of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide ideal gas. No real gas obeys ideal gas law, because, real gases have actual real volume, actual real weight relative to each other, actually interact with each other, etc. as above in forming carbonic acid, rain. Real molecules do not bounce off each other so thoroughly mixing as AGWScience claims. Carbon dioxide is a real molecule of gas which has real volume, it is not an imaginary ideal gas in an imaginary test tube. Neither do carbon dioxide molecules get dispersed by Brownian motion to mix throroughly in air as AGWScience also claims. Examples given such as ink mixing with water, or scent mixing through the air in a room, are examples of mixing by convection, not Brownian motion.

So you see, for every claim about the properties and processes in our physical world by AGWScience the debunking is not a simple task. It doesn’t matter to AGWScience that its claims are impossible in the real world, its only interest is to confuse and dumbdown the population into believing ‘whatever it says’ is ‘true’. Even when its own reasons contradict each other it is not bothered, as long as the memes get into mass consciousness it doesn’t care that the claims don’t make sense. But they don’t want this to be discussed by the masses being actively duped, so much of their ‘defence’ is geared to preventing discussion.

Re Mario Molina – bearing the above in mind, there are two very good posts on this page which will give you a clearer understanding of ozone and cfcs in the real world, and which hopefully will guide you back from the other side of the looking glass where one can believe any number of impossible things before breakfast and where AGWScience has set up shop. You can make your own judgement as to whether Molina is ignorant of real physics and real properties of molecules or is a deliberate peddler of misinformation for the entity AGWScience fiction.

The PDO and El Niño/La Niña variations are defined as certain patterns of physical observation, mostly of sea surface temperature, air pressure and ocean current directions.
It is circular to have the pattern of temperature/pressure/current direction values defined as the cause of … the pattern of temp/pressure/vector values.

The PDO is a value derived from measurement, it isn’t an active causal agent in its own right.

“What? Why? What role does Earth’s rotation, spherical shape and “Earth surface is not a square metre” play in the amount of solar radiation reaches the surface?”

I suspect other posts have clarified it better by now but I’ll try once more…
The 0.1% change in solar energy is measured in two contexts which give different values, but are the SAME solar variation.
For a square meter in space perpendicular to the Sun the solar variation is ~1.3W/m2 the 0.1% of 1366W/m2

But as you have pointed out a percentage of that is reflected and plays no further part in the energy balance.
But the inclination of the surface to the Sun also matters. For instance during a polar summer the sun never sets and the pole gets the full 1366W/m2 24hr a day.
But that 1366W is shining on FAR more than a square meter because the inclination of the Sun is so low.
Because the Earth is a rotating sphere each 1366W/m2 from the Sun is effectively spread over 4m2 of the Earths surface. Therefore the lower figure is 0.1% of the total solar energy per square meter of the Earths SURFACE.

Bystander should appreciate that you might feel sick and see your doctor, but the state of medical science is still in many ways primeval. If you are ‘lucky’ you might have something the doc. understands but still might not be able to do anything about, like the common cold.. If you are unlucky it could well be an area that is poorly or not understood at all viz. some forms of cancer, MS, mental problems etc etc etc.
I’d say a bit like climate science.

@- Myrrh says:
July 3, 2011 at 2:49 am
“Carbon Dioxide ‘well-mixed’ and ‘accumulating in the atmosphere’ a case in point. I’ve given two real physical pieces of information which debunks this, (CO2 is heavier than the fluid gaseous atmosphere and so does not readily rise into the air, but will always spontaneously gravitate down to earth because it displaces the lighter nitrogen and oxygen molecules, ”

The story that Galileo dropped a small and large cannonball from the Pisa belfry is probably fiction. But he did use a neat logical argument that all objects of different weights fall at the same speed.
CO2 doesn’t fall any faster than N2.

The molecules of gas are moving at around 500m/s or about a THOUSAND miles an hour. There is no way with those velocities you will get gases stratifying out by weight within the first few miles of the atmosphere. If they did… O2 heaver than N2, we would be walking in a few inches of CO2 and with our heads in pure oxygen!

A parallel would be to half fill a large box with a mix of tennis balls and baseballs, Shake vigorously to maintain an average velocity of the balls of ~1000 miles an hour.
Do you think that there will be more baseballs than tennis balls in the bottom half of the box?
Do you think that eventually they will separate if they are kept moving at those velocities?

The extent and timescale at which CO2 mixes into the global atmosphere was closely studied, not by ‘AGWscience’ but by the military tracking the excess C14 isotopes produced from above-ground nuclear tests. They had an interest in how radioactive fallout might spread. The nuclear test C14 went global within 4 years and is still being rained out

Pat Frank says:
June 30, 2011 at 4:26 pmUnless, perhaps, the ultraviolet radiation is ionizing and produces a significant flux of electrons and cation radicals in the upper atmosphere. Cation radicals, as we all know from cloud chamber effects, can produce condensation nuclei and induce clouds. Slides 2 and 3 in the link show that both cation radicals and the freed electron can produce independent cascades of droplet nucleation. Nature is full of cascades produced by small initial perturbations.
—
The usual loose verbiage: “upper atmosphere” meaning what? UV is absorbed in the stratosphere where there is very little water vapor
======
Siliggy says:
June 30, 2011 at 8:24 pmAlso The heat from radioactive decay does not seem to be counted in any of the radiative balance charts. is it about 0.8 W/M^2?
The radioactive decay does not change on time scales of interest, so is not relevant to the climate change debate. Apart from the fact that you overstate the amount; it is only 0.08 W/m2 [ten times less].
======
Alexander Feht says:
June 30, 2011 at 8:21 pmVery useful list, clearly demonstrating the unbelievable arrogance and ignorance of IPCC.
And of many posters at WUWT.2) Special references to Dr. Svalgaard’s opinions are unnecessary; they don’t deserve any special consideration or exposure.
And what do you bring to the table? But, you are right, my opinion is just my opinion, like anyone else’s. Ignore it if you like, but don’t tell others what to do.
======
justthefactswuwt says:
July 3, 2011 at 1:03 amBased on these estimates, on average about 51% of the 1.3 Watts per square meter (W/m2) would reach the surface, thus on average .663 Watts per square meter (W/m2) of the energy would reach the surface.
I thought we had a consensus here, why is Trenberth’s estimate so much lower than the PhysicalGeography.net estimate?
Of the 342 W/m2 available, 168 W/m2 = 49% is absorbed by the surface. You are off by some factor of 1000 or 1000/4, so it is not clear what you mean.
======
izen says:
July 3, 2011 at 4:16 amBut that 1366W is shining on FAR more than a square meter because the inclination of the Sun is so low.
Because the Earth is a rotating sphere each 1366W/m2 from the Sun is effectively spread over 4m2 of the Earths surface. Therefore the lower figure is 0.1% of the total solar energy per square meter of the Earths SURFACE.
Why is this even being discussed?

I haven’t seen any examples in the first category but I’m not a regular reader. I suppose they are not impossible in principle. I see plenty of examples in the other categories. Usually nobody bothers to challenge them, since the name of the game is to challenge mainstream science. But the consequence is that most of the challenges are worthless. You need some mechanism to challenge the lousy ones and promote the good ones if you expect the scientific community to bother to engage in some manner other than didactic.

That said I support izen’s didactic effort to explain the factor of 4 in the astronomical vs earth science measures of the solar constant.. I have seen places you’d really expect to know better get confused about this. The solar constant referred to a square meter of space at the earth’s orbit is exactly one quarter of the solar constant referred to a square meter at the top of the atmosphere. This is because the cross section of a sphere has exactly a quarter of the area of the surface of the same sphere.

Greenhouse forcing only makes sense in the latter context, so to compare them you have to use the smaller value of solar constant. When somebody has put some effort into explaining it, you should do comparable work trying to understand it. Ignoring it or dismissing it contemptuously doesn’t bode well for actually making progress on understanding what is going on.

“Surface area of a sphere = 4PIr2″
That is all good except the distance from pole to pole is shorter than the diameter at the equator.
So to divide TSI by four is wrong.
“But the inclination of the surface to the Sun also matters. For instance during a polar summer the sun never sets and the pole gets the full 1366W/m2 24hr a day.
But that 1366W is shining on FAR more than a square meter because the inclination of the Sun is so low.”
To complicate this even further Albedo would be increased by the angle of incidence change. Stand up close to the end of a window and look at the reflection from an angle.
Now this gets interesting with the TSI spectoral change because the critical point and refractive index shift with wavelength. So the solarcycle spectoral shift would change the effective albedo more at the poles than at the equator. Note this is not an effect due to the Change in TSI but due soley to the spectoral shift. If the TSI were to not change at all but there was only a spectoral shift there would still be a change in effective albedo due to the change in the amount of reflection at angle.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equationshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index

“The presence of the moon (which has about 1/81 the mass of the Earth), is slowing Earth’s rotation and lengthening the day by about 2 ms every one hundred years.”

“However some large scale events, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, have caused the rotation to speed up by around 3 microseconds.[21] Post-glacial rebound, ongoing since the last Ice age, is changing the distribution of the Earth’s mass thus affecting the Moment of Inertia of the Earth and, by the Conservation of Angular Momentum, the Earth’s rotation period.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation”

I’d like to add mention that many, if not most or all, of the oscillations mentioned in “Gravitation” are probably also synchronised by resonance effects of the whole terrestrial system (honourable mention here of the ‘Stadium wave’ which suggests how the energy may transfer between the different oscillations). I also suspect related resonsnce influences in both solar system and solar data – after all, the whole system has had plenty of time to fall into ‘sync’, and we know that weather is broadly cyclical.

presented an interesting hypothesis at ICCC on Friday that many of the cycles we see in Earth’s climate correlate well with cycles in orbital configurations, which makes sense intuitively, because, over the long term, tidal forces;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force

do seem to play an important role in Earth’s climate system, e.g.

“With the culmination of the 18.6-year cycle of the Moon in 2006 and again in 2024-25, also called the Major Lunar Standstill, we are afforded the unique opportunity to observe the monthly, annual, and 18.6-year wanderings of the Moon. The 18.6-year cycle is caused by the precession of the plane of the lunar orbit, while this orbit maintains a 5° tilt relative to the ecliptic. At the peak of this cycle, the Moon’s declination swings from -28.8° to +28.8° each month. What this means is that each month for the years 2005-2007 and also 2023-2026, the Moon can be seen rising and setting more northerly and also more southerly than the solar extremes, and will transit monthly with altitudes which are higher in the sky than the summer Sun and lower in the sky than the winter Sun.”http://www.umass.edu/sunwheel/pages/moonteaching.html

“Lunar cycles are varied and extremely complex and yet the moon has more effect on the earth than any other body except the Sun. Not only are ocean tides important in shaping the earth, and are affected more by the moon than the Sun, but tides in the air are important for determining the weather which in turn affects so many other variables from plants and crops, to animals and the economy.”

“As was mentioned the 18.6 year cycle is important in determining the weather as is half of this, or 9.3 years. These cycles can be found in crop yields and in geological formations. However the moon is gradually receding from the earth which changes all of these periods very slowly. Professor Afanasiev of Moscow University has designed a method that he calls “Nanocycles method” of very accurately dating geological formations by finding the period which is presently 9.3 years and its interaction with the seasons. The 9.3 year cycle comes at the same time of year on average every 31 years because 9.3/.3 = 31. The nearest repeat of the seasons will actually happen after 28 years 2/3 of the time and 37 years 1/3 of the time. However this 31 years cyle of seasonal interaction of the is very sensitive to small changes because when the cycle was 9.2 years the interaction was in 9.2/.2 = 46 years. Professor Afanasiev has used this to accurately date deposits and so determine other geological cycles very accurately.”http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/cycles-astronomy/lunar.shtml

Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers “Lunar nodal tide effects on variability of sea level, temperature, and salinity in the Faroe-Shetland Channel and the Barents Sea” by Harald Yndestad, William R. Turrell and Vladimir Ozhigin, 2008:http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008DSRI…55.1201Y

With this said, I don’t have a good source for this one yet. Once Willie’s presentation and eventually paper become available I’ll add them under 3. Gravitation: System Resonance, unless someone’s got a better name for it

“justthefactswuwt says: July 3, 2011 at 1:03 am
Based on these estimates, on average about 51% of the 1.3 Watts per square meter (W/m2) would reach the surface, thus on average .663 Watts per square meter (W/m2) of the energy would reach the surface.”

Of the 342 W/m2 available, 168 W/m2 = 49% is absorbed by the surface. You are off by some factor of 1000 or 1000/4, so it is not clear what you mean.

Somehow I’ve allowed myself to be dragged into a stupid discussion on how much of the “approximately 0.1% or about 1.3 Watts per square meter (W/m2)” 11 year cycle variation in solar radiation that’s “received at the outer surface of Earth’s atmosphere”, makes it through to Earth’s surface. It seems like a pointless exercise as the atmosphere introduces so many additional variables as to make the resultant estimate unnecessarily imprecise. Given that the 11 year cycle variation of about 1.3 Watts per square meter (W/m2) at the outer surface of Earth’s atmosphere isn’t sufficient to have a large influence on Earth’s temperature, it seem pointless to try to estimate and use the smaller and less precise number at surface level. What do you think?

justthefactswuwt says:
July 3, 2011 at 3:33 pmGiven that the 11 year cycle variation of about 1.3 Watts per square meter (W/m2) at the outer surface of Earth’s atmosphere isn’t sufficient to have a large influence on Earth’s temperature, it seem pointless to try to estimate and use the smaller and less precise number at surface level. What do you think?
We don’t even know the albedo well enough for this to matter. To first order, what reaches the surface will scale with what comes from the sun. Just do the calculation in percent and the problem goes away: dTSI/TSI =0.1% and dT/T = 0.1/4%. The 4 is from S-B law, not spherical Earth. So with dT/T = 0.025% of 288K we get dT = 0.072 K

“The El Nino / Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an oceanic / atmospheric oscillation of the equatorial Pacific / southern Pacific. Various indexes have been derived from measurements in the area.”http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/ENSO.htm

It is circular to have the pattern of temperature/pressure/current direction values defined as the cause of … the pattern of temp/pressure/vector values.

The PDO is a value derived from measurement, it isn’t an active causal agent in its own right.

you’ll see that a summary of the key variables involved in Ocean Circulation. Regardless of the exact cause of the PDO cycle, this chart;

seems to indicate that we are entering a PDO Cold Regime, and are in for an extended stay. This graphic;

provides a good comparative visual of the difference in Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures during Cold and Warm PDO Regimes.

Do you think that some portion of the increase in temperature between 1975 and 2005 might have been caused by oceanic circulations and cycles, as indicated by the increase the Sea Surface Temperature that occurred during the PDO Warm Regime?

I suspect other posts have clarified it better by now but I’ll try once more…
The 0.1% change in solar energy is measured in two contexts which give different values, but are the SAME solar variation.
For a square meter in space perpendicular to the Sun the solar variation is ~1.3W/m2 the 0.1% of 1366W/m2

But as you have pointed out a percentage of that is reflected and plays no further part in the energy balance.
But the inclination of the surface to the Sun also matters. For instance during a polar summer the sun never sets and the pole gets the full 1366W/m2 24hr a day.
But that 1366W is shining on FAR more than a square meter because the inclination of the Sun is so low.
Because the Earth is a rotating sphere each 1366W/m2 from the Sun is effectively spread over 4m2 of the Earths surface. Therefore the lower figure is 0.1% of the total solar energy per square meter of the Earths SURFACE.

Not a square meter perpendicular to the Sun above the atmosphere.

I don’t understand the point of this exercise. I agree that the .1% variation in TSI during the solar cycle is not a significant factor in the warming between 1975 – 2005, from wherever you want to measure it. I want your opinion of whether the Ocean Circulation/Cycles might be a significant factor in the global warming that occurred between 1975 – 2005 and what it might portend for the next 25 – 30 years…

> If CO2 perturbation decay time were short, CO2 concentrations would go down during a recession.

China is now the largest CO2 emitter by country. They didn’t have a recession, I don’t know if their growth rate slowed down.

One thing that was interesting at ICCC #6 is the disagreement about CO2 dwell time in the atmosphere. Alan Carlin didn’t talk about it, but I read his recent paper on the way down. His review of the literature left him convinced the dwell time is short. Some people at the ICCC said the dwell time is long.

Either way, I’m not too concerned. The key thing, CO2 feedback (plus H2O) appears greatly overstated. I talked to one scientist who expects to have a paper out soon adding to that theme.

The story that Galileo dropped a small and large cannonball from the Pisa belfry is probably fiction. But he did use a neat logical argument that all objects of different weights fall at the same speed. CO2 doesn’t fall any faster than N2.

The molecules of gas are moving at around 500m/s or about a THOUSAND miles an hour. There is no way with those velocities you will get gases stratifying out by weight within the first few miles of the atmosphere. If they did.. O2 heavier than N2, we would be walking in a few inches of CO2 and with our heads in pure oxygen!

Sigh. You’re imagining our real atmosphere to be an ‘ideal gas atmosphere’ – as if it’s empty space with molecules zipping around at great speeds through it, bouncing off each other and so ‘mixing thoroughly’, etc. . “Real” and ideal” are technical terms in physics when referring to gases. The ideal gas is an imaginary construct, no real gas is like an ideal gas nor does any real gas obey ideal gas law. You need to look up the difference, but you need to be vigilant, AGWScience takes bits of descriptions from physics and mixes and mismatches, takes out of context. You are giving an AGWScience description of our atmosphere because it says that nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide are ideal gases, but they’re not, they are real. Real gases have volume, etc. Our atmosphere is not empty space with tiny hard dots with no volume travelling at these vast speeds through it bouncing off other molecules also travelling through empty space at these vast speeds..

How does sound travel in your world?

You’ll need to get to grips with volume and the rest. Now, I don’t know if the first of these links is written by someone who knows the difference and is being disingenuous or just repeating an AGWScience meme, much as you’ve given an AGWScience standard meme response about speed and stratification into layers, it doesn’t matter here, the important thing is to note where it has been done.

That is a fib. It’s taken direct from ideal gas description, and doesn’t relate at all to real gases which have attractive force.

This is where, how, AGWScience has taken its description of gas molecules and pretends that this is a description of real gas molecules in our real world. That heading should include the word “Ideal”. As here:

An ideal gas is defined as one in which all collisions between atoms or molecules are perfectly elastic and in which there are no intermolecular atractive forces. One can visualize it as a collection of perfectly hard spheres which collide but which otherwise do not interact with each other. In such a gas, all the internal energy is in the form of kinetic energy and any change in internal energy is accompanied by a change in temperature.

[The last sentence is where AGWScience refers back to in its emphasis on radiation as the means of heat transfer and avoids mention of convection which requires an understanding of real volume and why AGW supporters think that the only effect of electromagnetic waves is to create heat, so have great difficulty understanding that the “Solar” energies such as Visible can’t actually heat water, but think that because blue light penetrates further in the ocean it is heating the ocean.]

Anyway, although it appears the first piece is making a distinction between ideal and real gases, it isn’t, it is saying that this is a description of Gases, but this is a description of Ideal Gas. Which is purely imaginary and comes from the beginning of first exploration into such things. The article gives the appearance of being about real gases, but these AGW memes are slipped in so the difference is not obvious, but hidden, he is mixing and taking out of context.. Especially because he gives the history of the named originators he gives the appearance of covering the subject, but, he has missed one out.

An ideal gas is one, which obeys the general gas equation of PV=nRT and other gas laws at all temperatures and pressures. A real gas, does not obey the general gas equation and other gas laws at all conditions of temperature and pressure.

Causes for deviations
In order to know the causes for deviations from ideality, Van der Waal pointed out the faulty assumption that were made in formulating the kinetic molecular model of gases. etc.

Now, you have to bear in mind as I said earlier, that AGWScience does not have any internal consistency in its ‘science’, it cherry picks and is perfectly happy to use conflicting ideas as it is to use ideal gas properties for real gases by taking descriptions out of context as here in the first link and from which you get your picture of our atmosphere as empty space with all these molecules speeding through it at great speeds. Not all energy creates heat in interactions, the ideal gas laws are wrongly applied to the real world..

Our atmosphere is a real gaseous volume of Air, gases and liquids are fluids so what we have pressing down on us at around a ton per sq ft is a heavy fluid, not empty space. It is volumes of this fluid moving around which is the way heat is transferred through convection in our real atmosphere and which in turn gives us ‘wind'; when a volume of this fluid is heated and becoming less dense rises into colder volumes above it, the heavier denser volumes displace the lighter volumes, what we feel as wind. Wind is volumes of the gas Air on the move. These do not cross over from one hemisphere to the other, although there is some mixing at the equator, but follow basic circulation patterns within their own hemispheres.

One description I read to get the ‘feel’ of this our real atmosphere. Imagine standing at the bottom of a swimming pool with 10′ of water above you, now go out into the middle of a field – the atmosphere of the fluid gas Air above us is like that. A ton of it on our shoulders. “Half of the Earth’s atmosphere is squashed down into the first 3 miles above, 90% is squashed into the first 10 miles. Above 10 miles the air is so thin that the pressure is less than the best vacuums on the surface of the earth.” Sorry, missing source for that. It is not empty space.

That there is ’empty’ space between molecules means that gases can be compressed, the high and low pressures we feel in our atmosphere. If it were really empty space with volumeless molecules zipping through it we would have no sound. We have sound because the weight of that volume under gravity stops molecules from zipping through it. They may well be moving at great speeds, but they’re going nowhere fast.

Sound is passed through the fluid Air as waves are passed through the ocean, the Air doesn’t move as wind, but the energy from the sound causes the molecules of the volume Air to vibrate and knock into the molecules around it causing them to vibrate and that vibration is passed along through the air. When they stop vibrating they’re still where they started.

Now, within all that. Molecules of nitrogen and oxygen are practically the same weight, together the combination gas Air. Making up practically 100% of our atmosphere, dry weight, apart from water vapour the rest are trace gases. Water vapour is a gas, it is lighter than the gas air, it always rises in air, evaporation. So too, heavier gases sink in air. Carbon dioxide is one and a half times heavier than air, it sinks, displacing air.

Whether one molecule or a bunch of them together, heavier than air gases will sink and lighter than air gases will rise.

In mines methane is a hazard, it used to be tested for in a new mine by sending someone in covered in wet towels and carrying a lit candle on a long pole – because lighter than air methane pools at the ceilings. Careful if you’re invited to a pss-up in a brewery, that you don’t fall asleep on the floor next to open vats of beer brewing… Large amounts of carbon dioxide will displace the lighter oxygen and suffocate you. A hazard around active volcanoes venting, because it will gather in a layer in hollows, until dispersed by something acting on it to move it such as wind. It cannot diffuse into air of its own volition as if it were an ideal gas.

Please pardon a probably really dumb question, but this is something that has been bugging me for a while. The ENSO Sea Surface Temperature graphic here .
So then is it Vorticity that makes the SST leave the wake pattern that it does in the oceans? The speed of rotation at the poles versus the speed of rotation at the equator and the speed of rotation at deeper depths versus the speed of rotation at the surface, along with the ocean currents, that causes changes in various water temperatures.

It’s a good question. If you watch the Equatorial Pacific in this 1 year Sea Surface Temperature animation as the La Nina takes hold last year;

you’ll see curling. This curling is also apparent in the same location in this 1 year Sea Surface Salinity animation:

I am not sure. We know that planetary vorticity is a major player in ocean circulation;

“12.4 Important Concepts

1. Vorticity strongly constrains ocean dynamics.

2. Vorticity due to Earth’s rotation is much greater than other sources of vorticity.

3. Taylor and Proudman showed that vertical velocity is impossible in a uniformly rotating flow. The ocean is rigid in the direction parallel to the rotation axis. Hence Ekman pumping requires that planetary vorticity vary with latitude. This explains why Sverdrup and Stommel found that realistic oceanic circulation, which is driven by Ekman pumping, requires that f vary with latitude.

4. The curl of the wind stress adds relative vorticity to central gyres of each ocean basin. For steady state circulation in the gyre, the ocean must lose vorticity in western boundary currents.

6. Conservation of absolute vorticity in an ocean with constant density leads to the conservation of potential vorticity. Thus changes in depth in an ocean of constant density requires changes of latitude of the current.”

however, per numbers 4 and 5, relative vorticity might also be the cause of the equatorial features.

Myrrh says:
July 3, 2011 at 8:57 pmSigh. You’re imagining our real atmosphere to be an ‘ideal gas atmosphere’ – as if it’s empty space with molecules zipping around at great speeds through it, bouncing off each other and so ‘mixing thoroughly’,
double sigh. The air is to a very high approximation an ideal gas. Even near the center of the sun where the density is ten times that of lead, the material is very nearly an ideal gas. Your ideas about this are as wrong as they can be. Amazing that there are people out there who can be so wrong while pretending to know anything at all.

zen says:
July 2, 2011 at 5:03 pm
You are right on this: Tambora, at 2 Pg doesn’t equate to current rates of about 31 Pg/yr. My argument is weak here.

The climate does not appear to be unstable, however that lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack of instability, I grant you. Tornadoes are probably a good example of chaos theory in action: a buildup with little happening, a sudden burst of terrific change and activity and a very sudden end. A hurricane seems less of an example, as the process is incremental and progressive, and once started drifts away rather than stops abruptly. Weather systems and the climate are even longer term. progressive and incremental things.

CO2 as CAGW is positioned as a keystone gas with sudden, large and unexpected temperature effects. Temperature events are certainly sudden and unexpected, but going up and down don’t seem to be well correlated with CO2 changes. I understand the if A then B, if B not necessarily A problem with CO2 and temperature changes. But so far the temperature changes are slow, incremental and progressive, and less than the worrisome levels by the IPCC. If CO2 is not a keystone gas with a Mandelbrot chaotic nature, then the CAGW worry is untenable.

The evidence so far is not observational, but modelling. If we could agree to that, then what would be left is the argument about how much the Precautionary Principle should be applied. But since the science is “settled” and the outcome “certain” we cannot do that. Yet that is the crux: does CO2 additions to the atmosphere at 2 ppmv/yr from 392 to 560 or more trigger some detrimental and radical temperature change? So far the evidence says “no”. When does this threshold event occur? The IPCC model says there is a multiplier effect, but so far we are not seeing anything out of the historical mode if a 60-year cyclicity is allowed.

I see that by 2015 the difference between the IPCC warmist theories and the skeptics will be large enough and the trends going in the opposite directions long enough to determine if one is broken or at least sufficiently weakened for the CAGW threat to go away or – perish the thought – be about to bite our butts.

@-Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2011 at 12:06 pm
“..(izen).Because the Earth is a rotating sphere each 1366W/m2 from the Sun is effectively spread over 4m2 of the Earths surface. Therefore the lower figure is 0.1% of the total solar energy per square meter of the Earths SURFACE.”
“Why is this even being discussed?”
———————
Because a poster (Michael Tobias) using the lower figure of solar energy per square meter of the Earth surface was accused of getting the figure wrong and failing to use ‘giggle’ or search engines to get the ‘right’ figure.

It was a classic example of Dunning-Kruger, ignorance resulting in the accusation that someone with more accurate knowledge is wrong because they do not match the pre-conceptions already held.

@- justthefactswuwt says:
July 3, 2011 at 4:43 pm
“The causes of ocean circulation and oceanic oscillations are reasonably well known, if you look at the bottom of the WUWT Ocean Oscillation Page;http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/oceanic-oscillation/
you’ll see that a summary of the key variables involved in Ocean Circulation. ”

No, that page provides a lot of DESCRIPTION of the various ocean currents and patterns of behavior, but very little in the way of explanation of CAUSES.

@- Doug Proctor says:
July 3, 2011 at 10:45 pm
“The evidence so far is not observational, but modelling. If we could agree to that, then what would be left is the argument about how much the Precautionary Principle should be applied. But since the science is “settled” and the outcome “certain” we cannot do that. Yet that is the crux: does CO2 additions to the atmosphere at 2 ppmv/yr from 392 to 560 or more trigger some detrimental and radical temperature change?”

The evidence so far is observational. The measured rise in anthropogenic CO2. The measured absoprtion spectrum of CO2. The measured increase and spectal change in downwelling longwave radiation. The measured drop and spectral change in outgoing LW radiation.

And the measured rise in land and sea surface temperatures, the rise in sea level, the fall in glacier mass balance, the loss of polar sea ice, the increase in atmospheric water vapour, the decrease in snow cover and the various biological changes in growing times and extent for plants and animals.

Whether the incremental temperature change in response to the incremental rise in CO2 is detrimental or ‘radical’ in its effects on human society and specifically agricultural production systems is uncertain. And has more to do with uncertainty about the flexibility and robustness of societal responses than the magnitude of the climate change already experienced and most likely in the pipeline…

double sigh. The air is to a very high approximation an ideal gas. Even near the center of the sun where the density is ten times that of lead, the material is very nearly an ideal gas. Your ideas about this are as wrong as they can be. Amazing that there are people out there who can be so wrong while pretending to know anything at all.

:) Shrug, looking in a mirror Leif? Typical irrelevance or misdirection coupled with ad homs in replies from you when you don’t know what you’re talking about but like to pretend you do or deliberate distraction in an attempt to confuse to continue promoting AGWScience fiction memes. Don’t much care, I gave up expecting a straight answer from you a while back. Recall the last one? Let me known when you’re willing to actually interact with what’s being said.

As I mentioned earlier, there is no internal consistency from AGWScience fiction inc. Because here they describe the molecules of our atmosphere as ideal gases, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, but exclude water vapour – why? Because they say water vapour is localised and doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for any length of time.. ??!

So, because AGWScience deliberately joins out of context or disproved concepts to its promotion of its ideology/science fiction, the unwary get the impression that molecules of carbon dioxide are zipping through empty space bouncing off the other molecules and so thoroughly mixing that it can’t become unmixed, and so is proportionally the same all through the atmosphere and that it can accumulate and stay up for hundreds and even thousands of years because ideal gases don’t have weight and volume relative to each other and therefore do not separate out. Believers of this science fiction package have no sense of how the real carbon dioxide moves in the atmosphere, the Carbon Life Cycle is a closed book to them. As is the Water Cycle, because explaining that would have to bring in that water vapour is lighter than Air and carries heat away from the Earth. Where they mention the Earth would be 67°C without the water cycle, it is garbled so the connection to real properties and processes can’t be made.

The whole real world is a closed book to those enmeshed in AGWScience. They argue from out of context laws and physical impossibilities because that is what they have been taught. Those producing the memes know very well what is possible and not from traditional science, blue visible Light cannot heat water..

Those real applied scientists working in various fields know that molecules are real, have real properties relative to each other, interact with each other in different ways, that attraction and volume is not negligible; see the etc. on the tutorvista link.

Myrrh says:
July 4, 2011 at 5:00 amLet me known when you’re willing to actually interact with what’s being said.
Hard to interact with nonsense.

here they describe the molecules of our atmosphere as ideal gases, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, but exclude water vapour – why? Because they say water vapour is localised and doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for any length of time.. ??!
Right, it rains at times, even snows here and there.

Gases do not move at vast speeds through real air, they vibrate where they are – how sound travels
Sound waves have nothing to do with the thermal motions of the molecules. Here you can learn more about gases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_theory

@-Myrrh says:
July 4, 2011 at 5:00 am
“Those real applied scientists working in various fields know that molecules are real, have real properties relative to each other, interact with each other in different ways, that attraction and volume is not negligible;”

If it is not negliable you will be able to give at least an estimate of how much the real atmosphere does deviate from the ideal gas law at the usual range of temperature, pressure and volume found in the real world.

Here’s a clue –http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/kinetic/waal.html
Note that the number of moles of gas involved is ma factor, the greater the amount of gas the closer to the ideal gas equations things become. For the total atmosphere the real applied scientists working on jet engine design for instance know that the deviation from the ideal gas laws is negligable and can be ignored.
It really only becomes a factor at very high temperatures and pressures, although as Leif has indicated, for light atoms like hydrogen and helium it isn’t much of a factor at the temperatures and pressures in the solar interior.

Before you can credibaly claim that a whole branch of science has egregiously ignored the difference between the ideal gas laws and the behavior of the atmosphere which might require the application of Van der Waals equation, or the Redlich–Kwong equation of state, or Soave modification of Redlich-Kwong or Peng–Robinson equation of state or even the Elliott, Suresh, Donohue equation of state; you need to show that they NEED to allow for these modifications – and don’t.

Do you have any evidence that the ‘real atmosphere’ needs these modifications to the ideal gas laws to describe climate interactions? Or that the ‘AGWscience’ does NOT use them where appropiate?

Sound travels as a density variation and not as individual air molecules travelling from source to ear.

But the molecules of air ARE moving at vast speeds of around 1000 miles an hour, and bouncing around and off each other continually. Perhaps this will help you grasp this subject better –http://www.uccs.edu/~tchriste/courses/PHYS549/549lectures/gasses.html
You might like to calculate the mean free path, the distance traveled between collisions for an air molecule at room temperature and pressure.

> Gases do not move at vast speeds through real air, they vibrate where they are

Vibrate in this context means moving back and forth, well not necessarily in line, more of bouncing around. In wind free conditions there’s no net movement, in a wind, air molecules are trending in the direction of the wind.

Ultimately sound is carried by air molecules, the pressure waves are carried by air molecules bouncing off each other. In near ideal gases (like air), the mean free path where they aren’t significantly interacting is long relative the distance where electrons are repelling each other during each bounce.

Sound travels about 1000 feet per second, some 300 m/s. This implies the average speed of air molecules away from the sound source is 300 m/s. The actual speed has to be significantly higher since molecules are really flying around in all directions. I don’t know what that speed is, but I wouldn’t call it a vast speed.

You note that air molecules vibrate – please describe how you envision the momentum of air molecules changes as they vibrate – that may help us understand how you see gases behave.

Because a poster (Michael Tobias) using the lower figure of solar energy per square meter of the Earth surface was accused of getting the figure wrong and failing to use ‘giggle’ or search engines to get the ‘right’ figure.

It was a classic example of Dunning-Kruger, ignorance resulting in the accusation that someone with more accurate knowledge is wrong because they do not match the pre-conceptions already held.

You are also wrong as “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I leave it to readers to determine where the Dunning–Kruger effect might apply in this particular exchange…

@- justthefactswuwt says: July 3, 2011 at 4:43 pm

No, that page provides a lot of DESCRIPTION of the various ocean currents and patterns of behavior, but very little in the way of explanation of CAUSES.

This is verges on semantics, which I have no interest in. We understand the key contributors of energy into ocean circulation, which I refer to as the causes. However, I agree that we have a “very little in the way of explanation” as to how all of these factors interact to generate specific Oceanic Oscillations. Are you suggesting that we should be ignoring the PDO, El Nino/La Nina, etc. until we are able to explain exactly why they occur?

Why won’t you answer my question, i.e. Do you think that some portion of the increase in Earth’s temperature that occurred between 1975 and 2005 might be related to Ocean Circulation/Cycles, as indicated by the increase the Sea Surface Temperature that occurred in the pacific during the PDO Warm Regime? If so, what do you think this might portend for the next 25 – 30 years?

I was admiring the thunderheads, when I read the caption: “When the weather conditions are right the Black Forest in southern Germany can turn into a thunderstorm factory.” That got me thinking about all the trees that used to be in the United States that were cut down. All those forests producing clouds. So I decided to see if I could find a map showing the severity of these land use changes, and I found this one. I couldn’t get the website to work, and I’m a little pressed for time at the moment, but you’ll get the picture.

How much of the warming curve did IPCC attribute to lack of cloud cover from deforestation (or: the positive feedback on land use changes)? None, they consider land use changes as a regional effect, and do not consider the associated reduction in cloud cover from deforestation.

I also spotted a phenomena I was completely unfamiliar with: Namely in the North Poles region Ice Map it appears when melting in that region first begin most every-time it’s in the region between Ellesmere Island (Canada) and just slightly North of Thule, Greenland. Perhaps someone could help me understand why that particular region first, what are the ocean currents in that Strait, Strait water temperature at various depths, or peculiar weather patterns that cause such an effect. That particular melts appear before surrounding ice even begins to melt – never would have noticed but for this exercise. That’s weird. I’ve always seen ice melt at the edges first then moved backward. That particular area is not a normal ice melt – it should not melt in the middle first.

@- justthefactswuwt says:
July 4, 2011 at 9:58 am
“For the record, the poster (Michael Tobis) stated that, “As far as I know, nothing in the published literature indicates anything larger than 0.3 W/m^2 peak-to-peak solar variability on decadal-to-century time scales.”
I said that this statement was wrong, and provided links to several data sources and published literature all using the much more common “approximately 0.1% or about 1.3 Watts per square meter (W/m2) peak-to-trough during the 11-year sunspot cycle” measured at the ”outer surface of Earth’s atmosphere”:”

Okay, one last time.
It depends on which -‘The Published Literature’- you are referring to.

If you confine yourself to the astronomy, solar physics research then it is very unlikely you will see the 0.3W/m2 peak-to-peak figure because they are not concerned with the terrestrial impact of the Sun, only in detecting, measuring, describing and ultimately explaining the variations.

If you confine yourself to the literature published on the climate you are unlikely to see the 1.3W/m2 because this is not comparable with the units used for all the other factors in the energy budget that are given in W/m2 over the EARTH SURFACE. The figure used in the published (Climate/Earth sciences) literature is almost invariably the 0.3W/m2 because this allows easy comparison with all the other energy fluxes.
When M Tobias used the 0.3W/m2 as a climate researcher he was being consistent, and correct, because that is the value of 0.1% solar variation on the Earth which is comparable with the other energy fluxes. If you are familiar with the climate science literature then this value is familiar and how it is derived from the top-of-atmosphere value is well known.

So accusing him of being in error about the magnitude of solar variation and suggesting he use google to correct his ‘mistake’….

justthefactswuwt says:
“I leave it to readers to determine where the Dunning–Kruger effect might apply in this particular exchange…”

Quite.

justthefactswuwt says:
“We understand the key contributors of energy into ocean circulation, which I refer to as the causes.”

There are only three sources of energy contributing to ocean currents. Thermal energy from the sun, gravitational energy from the Earth and tidal interactions with the Moon/Sun and the rotational energy of the Earth.

justthefactswuwt says:
“I agree that we have a “very little in the way of explanation” as to how all of these factors interact to generate specific Oceanic Oscillations. Are you suggesting that we should be ignoring the PDO, El Nino/La Nina, etc. until we are able to explain exactly why they occur?”

No, just that we should use them only as descriptions, not causes. I understand you think this is just semantics, not meaning, but it is a common mistake in science. A set of observations are manipulated into a reified parameter, index or statistically derived definition of a pattern of data. That is then used as IF it was an independent ‘object’ with causal properties.
It is only ever a glorified description.

We dont ignore El Niño events because they have a significant effect on the pacific weather for a year or two, with influences globally. The warmer and colder areas of the pacific surface follow a specific pattern. But that pattern of temperature is NOT an explanation for the temperature distribution.
Describing a weather pattern as an ‘El Niño’ event is only ever that, a description not an explanation.

That is why I am unable to answer you question – “Do you think that some portion of the increase in Earth’s temperature that occurred between 1975 and 2005 might be related to Ocean Circulation/Cycles, as indicated by the increase the Sea Surface Temperature that occurred in the pacific during the PDO Warm Regime? ”
Because it carries the implicit assumption in the ‘might be related’ term that the PDO and other ocean ‘cycles’ are related causally to temperature changes.

The best answer I can give that avoids this misconception is that the ocean ‘cycles’ we see are PART OF the warming observed between 1975 and 2005 (and since). They are a part of the total description we have of the system. They cannot have a primary causal role because they are energy neutral, they can only shape the timing of energy fluxes, and that probably only as a contingent response to the energy inputs and outputs.

There are only three sources of energy contributing to ocean currents. Thermal energy(1) from the sun, gravitational energy(2) from the Earth and tidal interactions(3) with the Moon/Sun and the rotational energy(4) of the Earth.

I do love the irony of a simple mistake directly after someone insults another person’s intelligence.

It depends on which -’The Published Literature’- you are referring to.

Clearly, I should have know he was referring to only that “published literature” versus all of the “published literature”, when he erroneously stated that “nothing in the published literature indicates anything larger than 0.3 W/m^2 peak-to-peak solar variability on decadal-to-century time scales.” I’m such an idiot… :)

There are only three sources of energy contributing to ocean currents. Thermal energy from the sun, gravitational energy from the Earth and tidal interactions with the Moon/Sun and the rotational energy of the Earth.

I’d argue that there are at least 8 sources of energy at play in Oceanic Circulation:

Eventually Cosmic Rays might also be added to the list, if it can be shown that Cosmic Rays do in fact influence cloud formation and the associated clouds or lack thereof, influences Oceanic Circulation. Furthermore, Solar Wind might be added if it was found to modulate said Cosmic Rays, such to influence cloud formation and influence Oceanic Circulation. However, at present these associations seem tenuous at best.

We dont ignore El Niño events because they have a significant effect on the pacific weather for a year or two, with influences globally.

Because it carries the implicit assumption in the ‘might be related’ term that the PDO and other ocean ‘cycles’ are related causally to temperature changes.

Are you questioning whether Ocean “Cycles” can be “related causally to atmospheric temperature changes”?

The best answer I can give that avoids this misconception is that the ocean ‘cycles’ we see are PART OF the warming observed between 1975 and 2005 (and since).

So when measuring climate sensitivity to CO2, we should be identifying the “PART OF” the warming observed between 1975 and 2005 that might be related to natural oceanic cycles and eliminate it, lest we over estimate Earth’s sensitivity to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations?

justthefactswuwt says:
July 4, 2011 at 2:26 pm
“So when measuring climate sensitivity to CO2, we should be identifying the “PART OF” the warming observed between 1975 and 2005 that might be related to natural oceanic cycles and eliminate it, lest we over estimate Earth’s sensitivity to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations?”

It seems a rather short time-scale to use, but in principle yes.
But if PART OF the warming observed between 1975 and 2005 IS related to natural oceanic cycles then where did the energy come from ?
You cannot warm stuff without either adding energy or slowing its rate of loss.
If the energy was allready in the oceans, then they would not have expanded as they warmed over that period.
If the ocean currents slowed the rate of heat loss… how?
Good observation shows surface warming over the period which would INCREASE the rate of energy loss, not reduce it.

You have counted gravitational energy twice.
Tides and density stratification are different effects driven by the same source of energy.

Actually, I did that because it looked like you had listed them separately due to the double use of ‘and’ and the lack of comma between ‘…Moon/Sun and… made me read it as a list broken up by bad grammar. :-)

Earth’s orbit around the Sun, Earth’s tilt, Earth’s wobble and the Moon’s orbit around Earth, Earth’s Rotation, and the gravity of the Moon, Sun and Earth, act in concert to determine the constantly evolving Tidal Force on Earth:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force

When measuring climate sensitivity to CO2, we should be identifying the “PART OF” the warming observed between 1975 and 2005 that might be related to natural oceanic cycles and eliminate it, lest we over estimate Earth’s sensitivity to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations?

Just The Facts;
All climate is local. Any western gardener knows this is true. Why else is climate described and classified by zones? See the Western Garden Book for a good starting list of factors that determine what your local climate is.http://www.sunset.com/garden/climate-zones/climate-zones-intro-us-map-00400000036421/
Off the top of my head the list includes:
Latitude
Elevation
Slope (steepness)
Exposure (north, south, east, west)
prevailing wind
humidity
soil type
drainage
humidity
T max,T min, Delta T
number of frost free days
proximity to bodies of water
humidity
micro-climate
seasonal precipitation
rain-shadow effect
Humidity (again).
You get the point.

The climate is the very definition of a chaotic system. I heard an interview with Lorenz (discoverer of chaos theory). He had run a climate model and there was a problem before the run could be completed. He needed the results and didn’t have enough time to run the model again. He decided to run the model with fewer significant digits. That would speed up the process with, he thought, a loss of accuracy. The results were, however, completely different. This led to: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? ” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

I’ve considered this, but while there are chaotic components and occurrences throughout the climate system, I do not think that “the climate is the very definition of a chaotic system”. I think that, with many more generations of measurement and research, eventually we will be able to identify a reasonable degree of order within the overall system. I was quite deliberate in my phrasing of it as “sometimes chaotic”. I think it just seems more chaotic from our current vantage point because our present understanding of Earth’s climate system is so rudimentary.

“I’ve also struggled with the use of Wiki and eschewed them for a couple years, but there have been some improvements, they are the most comprehensive source and I’ve decided that the best way to fix the issues with Wiki is to shine the light of scrutiny on them”

All the historical and theoretical evidence is that ocean currents/cycles are energy neutral.
They can store, move and release energy in response to changes in the energy balance, but don’t cause or drive them.
Like water vapour they are a feedback not a forcing.

and whatever imparted it, that embodies “orbital energy”, gravity just constrains its path. For reference, “orbital velocity of the Moon about the Earth (1 km/s) is small compared to the orbital velocity of the Earth about the Sun (30 km/s)”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon

It seems a rather short time-scale to use, but in principle yes.
But if PART OF the warming observed between 1975 and 2005 IS related to natural oceanic cycles then where did the energy come from ?

I’d assume it comes primarily from the Sun, with a minor contribution from Geothermic.

You cannot warm stuff without either adding energy or slowing its rate of loss.
If the energy was allready in the oceans, then they would not have expanded as they warmed over that period.

Valid point. There is an increase in Ocean Heat Content;

that still needs a explanation.

If the ocean currents slowed the rate of heat loss… how?
Good observation shows surface warming over the period which would INCREASE the rate of energy loss, not reduce it.

Here’s where I’d like to do more research to understand the mechanisms behind ocean heat loss. Conceptually, I imagine if ocean deepwater mixing decreased, it might allow a pool of warmer water to remain on the surface, which could contribute to an increase in atmospheric temperature. However, this would seem to increase the rate of energy loss, which isn’t borne out by the Ocean Heat Content data.

izen says: July 5, 2011 at 1:01 am

The basic reason is the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

All the historical and theoretical evidence is that ocean currents/cycles are energy neutral.
They can store, move and release energy in response to changes in the energy balance, but don’t cause or drive them.
Like water vapour they are a feedback not a forcing.

I agree that averaged over the long term ocean currents/cycles are energy neutral, but imagine that at any moment in time, or even for extended periods, the ocean could be gaining or losing energy, depending on circulation patterns.

The long laundry list of geophysical processes presented here as the “ridiculously complex climate system” is curiously preoccupied with mechanical aspects, many of which (e.g., gravity waves) are of little consequence to the redistribution of thermal energy within the system. Even at the purely mechanical level, there is no sense of quantitative proportion, with second-order effects such as Ekman pumping (~micrometers/sec) presented on equal footing with geostrophic currents (~tens of cms/sec). This merely perpetuatues the notion that EVERYTHING is climate-related, an idea nurtured nowadays by academics seeking funding for marginal studies.

The planetary climate system is intrinsically a solar-driven thermodynamic one, with enthalpy serving to account for energy states (including work done by transmuted mechanical enegy) and with the profound priciple of entropy directing the energy flow through the material substances of the planet. Strangely, no reference is made to those key concepts. Absent any understanding of these physical essentials, it’s a small wonder that the system seems totally bewildering to the self-taught.

The following entry also has a grammar/typo error. May be the word ´grand.´

Not seeing this one. Do you mean the solar grand minimum?

This contribution is priceless. Last year, I spent several weeks on Donna´s IPCC audit. What about crowd-sourcing?

The more the merrier. The internet is an amazing tool for collecting and consolidating human knowledge.

AND, what about our friendly Castor X neighbors: for decades, they enjoyed the distinction of Greatest Changers of the Earth´s surface!

Yes, good one, “The beaver (genus Castor) is a primarily nocturnal, large, semi-aquatic rodent. Castor includes two extant species, North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) (native to North America) and Eurasian Beaver (Castor fiber) (Eurasia). Beavers are known for building dams, canals, and lodges (homes). They are the second-largest rodent in the world (after the capybara). Their colonies create one or more dams to provide still, deep water to protect against predators, and to float food and building material. The North American beaver population was once more than 60 million, but as of 1988 was 6–12 million. This population decline is due to extensive hunting for fur, for glands used as medicine and perfume, and because their harvesting of trees and flooding of waterways may interfere with other land useshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver

The long laundry list of geophysical processes presented here as the “ridiculously complex climate system” is curiously preoccupied with mechanical aspects, many of which (e.g., gravity waves) are of little consequence to the redistribution of thermal energy within the system. Even at the purely mechanical level, there is no sense of quantitative proportion, with second-order effects such as Ekman pumping (~micrometers/sec) presented on equal footing with geostrophic currents (~tens of cms/sec). This merely perpetuatues the notion that EVERYTHING is climate-related, an idea nurtured nowadays by academics seeking funding for marginal studies.

You want me to quantify the proportional impact of those beavers? It’s just a list, read into it as you wish.

The planetary climate system is intrinsically a solar-driven thermodynamic one, with enthalpy serving to account for energy states (including work done by transmuted mechanical enegy) and with the profound priciple of entropy directing the energy flow through the material substances of the planet. Strangely, no reference is made to those key concepts. Absent any understanding of these physical essentials, it’s a small wonder that the system seems totally bewildering to the self-taught.

Yes, I am sure all of the self-taught are totally bewildered and just wishing that they could delude themselves into knowing it all like you do…

See what I have to put up with? Your lack of comprehension is astonishingly suprising in one so, presumably, well educated. Was it really so difficult to join the dots and see what I was amused by?

The fluid gas molecules of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide are designated ideal gases while the fluid gas water vapour isn’t? And such a gobbledegook reason??! The utter stupidity of AGWScience is matched only by those who can see the stupidity but continue promoting it.

So, water vapour alone is allowed to have volume, weight etc., to interact with other molecules..? How then does carbon dioxide manage to interact with it to form carbonic acid? How??

AGWScience in its la-la land has carbon dioxide bouncing off water without interacting and water able to interact. What happens then? Since in real life this is a spontaneous interaction, rain is carbonic acid which shows they have combined, in la-la land the water is continually chasing carbon dioxide which bounces off the water which chases the carbon dioxide which still plays impossible to get – a sad saga of unrequited passion; rain in AGWScience isn’t carbonic acid.

Which words don’t you understand in the definition of ideal gas I posted a link? We can take this slowly.. I have a lot of patience.

Sound waves have nothing to do with the thermal motions of the molecules. Here you can learn more about gases

This was in response to my: “Gases do not move at vast speeds through real air, they vibrate where they are – how sound travels” Followed by an excellent page describing exactly this, “how sound travels an example of air is not ideal gas molecules, it takes sound, work, to move them, and then they finish vibrating and stay where they were. Is the concept of our atmosphere being a difinate entity with weight and volume that difficult to grasp? They may well be moving at vast speeds, but they’re not going anywhere under the great pressure of our atmosphere under gravity, a ton per square foot.

Well, again, I’m surprised you didn’t get my meaning and that you have apparently taken it out of context of it being a reply to izen who is under the impression from AGWScience that because molecules of carbon dioxide nitrogen and oxygen are ideal gases they rush through the atmosphere at great speeds and can’t separate out because they’re moving too fast. I thought it an excellent example to convey the real atmosphere which is our gas Air, which has weight , volume, subject to gravity etc., , and the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen not rushing anywhere – if they were rushing around at great speed through empty space around them there would be no sound.

This is why izen thinks they cannot separate out, but they do. Real life is full of examples of gases separating out and forming layers.. I gave examples.

Izen and Ric Werme – please make some effort to follow what I have made a great effort to explain. MY POINT, is that AGWScience promotes such memes which don’t have any reality in real world physics. Gases do separate out, they don’t travel at vast speeds through empty space, etc. I am showing where these memes are created. They’re created by taking laws, concepts and processes out of context, changing properties.

Until this is appreciated, understood, you won’t be able to spot other places where they do this. The other example I’ve given is the claim that Light, not Heat, warms the land and oceans; by excluding thermal infrared and saying short wave non-thermal convert the heat.. Visible Light from the Sun cannot convert water to heat – water is a transparent medium for it, it is transmitted through water without change. Except for a slowing down.

“Yes, I am sure all of the self-taught are totally bewildered and just wishing that they could delude themselves into knowing it all like you do…”

Oh my, you’ve got nothing but attitude to offer in your reply! And you’ve gotten a head start on delusions with your aphysical notion that planetary rotation is capabable of INITIATING any mechanical motion. Get back to me when billiard balls placed at rest on a table start rolling due to the Coriolis effect.

Myrrh says:
July 5, 2011 at 10:15 pmSo, water vapour alone is allowed to have volume, weight etc., to interact with other molecules..? How then does carbon dioxide manage to interact with it to form carbonic acid? How??
How does oxygen manage to interact with carbon to form carbon dioxide?
All reactions are simply molecules or atoms meeting. All gases, liquids, materials have volume, weight, etc. Not just water vapor. And all gases are molecules/atoms that move around at typically 1000 miles/hour through empty space. None of this has anything to do with AGW, but is basic, high school physics. When reading your tirades one stops wondering why the US is falling behind other nations in science. All it takes is enough Myrrhs out there.

And you’ve gotten a head start on delusions with your aphysical notion that planetary rotation is capabable of INITIATING any mechanical motion. Get back to me when billiard balls placed at rest on a table start rolling due to the Coriolis effect.

I do agree with “KevinK”, and somewhat grudgingly with “sky”, that I should include Thermodynamics as a variable. Do you think it is appropriate to include it under the “Solar Energy” category, should I create a new category “Physics” and put Gravitation and Thermodynamics under it, or otherwise?

justthefactswuwt says:
July 6, 2011 at 8:09 pmHello Leif, What are your thoughts on this comment by “KevinK”;…
I’am not sure what he is getting at. That the formula looks complex is a strawman. It is not really, just a simple fit to a non-linear relation, I don’t see where ‘thermodynamics’ comes in, but if you want to include all [including the kitchen sink], go ahead. It seems to me that a more fruitful approach would be to trim away stuff that is marginal and only keep what is important.

How does oxygen manage to interact with carbon to form carbon dioxide? All reactions are simpy molecules or atmos meeting. All gases, liquids, materials have volume, weight, etc. Not just water vapor. And all gases are molecules/atoms that move around at typically 1000 miles/hour through empty space. None of this has anything to do with AGW, but is basic, high school physics. When reading your tirades one stops wondering why the US is falling behind other nations in science. All it takes is enough Myrrhs out there.

Astonishing. You really don’t see the disjunct, do you? Something with volume and weight surrounded by others with volume and weight is not in empty space. Our atmosphere is the liquid gas Air comprised of nitrogen and oxygen, the molecules are constrained by the volume and weight of the molecules around them and by gravity. They are not moving at 1000 mph through our atmosphere.

AGWScience fiction teaches that this is empty space – with molecules of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide zooming around at these vast speed through this empty space because AGWScience teaches that these are ideal gases and obey ideal gas law. But they are real gases, no real gas obeys the ideal gas law. That is basic real world high school physics, or was. This is what has confused izen – why he thinks that the molecules are travelling so fast and bouncing off each other that they cannot separate out, because that’s the description of ideal gas without weight or volume, and, without interactions – your oxygen and carbon cannot form carbon dioxide! They can’t be both. And, that’s why y’all get hung up about kinetic energy as the only reaction with electromagnetic visible. Weren’t you taught that an ideal gas is purely imaginary? It doesn’t exist.

I posted links (July 3 11:53 am) firstly to a page typical of this AGWScience slant which appears to give loads of information about ideal and real gases, but instead confuses the two throughout – and even in giving the history of the various ideal gas laws it fails to give the continuation – disingenously. I also quoted the definition of the ideal gas from the second link – which if you’d bothered to read before producing your ranting attacks you might have got to grips with following my explanations and seen its your understanding that’s p*ss poor and that the true lack of real basic science education is because of people like you promoting it who don’t know what they’re talking about. And, I gave a quote about the continuation of the history in my last link. I suggest you read that post and make an effort to understand what I’m saying here. AGWScience is teaching flawed assumptions. This is well-known in real world traditional physics.

justhefactswuwt says:
July 6, 2011 at 9:18 pm- “I was thinking of in the context of heat transfer between the ocean and the atmosphere, but that it varies, means it probably deserves a place on the kitchen sink list.”

And the land and the atmosphere, heat rises and cold sinks. Convection is the main method of heat transfer in our atmosphere – this is the fluid gas Air, thus convection not radiation – from which we get our weather, our winds are basically created when volumes of hot air rise to be replaced by volumes of cold air. Without a proper understanding of thermodynamics here it isn’t possible to understand, for example, how the Water Cycle is the real greenhouse gas for cooling the Earth as it takes the heat away into the cooler heights where water vapour condenses out and releases the heat, which always flows spontaneously from the hotter to the colder.. As I mentioned before, the wiki page you linked to gave the accepted figure of 67&degC for the temp of the Earth without the Water Cycle, but it was garbled. It’s deliberately garbled because the promotion of AGWScience is for the meme that water in the atmosphere only adds heat from the upwelling thermal infrared, heat, and so the water cycle and convection and cooling have been thrown out.

The real greenhouse is our whole atmosphere, all the gases in our atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, that is they are also greenhouse gases. It was called this because like a real greenhouse where conditions are good and heating and cooling are regulated for optimum plant growth, our Earth has an atmosphere in which the heating and cooling is overall balanced for the proliferation of life out of the good conditions created by our gases. We really do need to get back to this and out of the ‘mind-set’ of AGWScience misdirection.

Myrrh says:
July 7, 2011 at 1:11 pmThey are not moving at 1000 mph through our atmosphere.
They are our atmosphere and our atmosphere consists solely of molecules moving through empty space [that between the molecules] at 1000 mph.

no real gas obeys the ideal gas law.
Of course not. That is why it is called the ideal gas law. But the real gases are very close to being ideal gases, and only deviate a few percent from the ideal law. This has been known for some centuries now. Even at the center of the sun where the gas has a density ten times that of lead, they very closely obey the ideal gas law. Their speed is even much higher [627 km/s] than in our cold atmosphere.

Myrrh says:
July 7, 2011 at 1:11 pmSomething with volume and weight surrounded by others with volume and weight is not in empty space.
Let us compute the volume of the Nitrogen in one cubic meter of air: the Nitrogen in the air weighs 1 kg. Since one N2 molecule weighs 4.76E-26 kg, there are 1 kg/4.76e-26 kg = 2E25 molecules in that 1 kg. Each molecule has a radius of about 1E-10 m, for a volume of 4pi/3*(1E-10)^3 = 4E-30 m^3. So all the 2E25 molecules together take up 2E25*4E-30 = 8E-5, or 0.00008 m^3. The remaining 0.99992 m^3 is empty space [we can omit the other gases that occupy an even smaller volume].

I think I have figured out why Myrrh is so disgruntled. He has realised that ‘AGWscience’, whatever that is, treats water vapour differently from other gases in the atmosphere like CO2, CH4, O2 and N2. He seems to assume that this means the other gases are considered to be ideal gases, while water vapour is not. I have not seen this distinction explicitely stated elsewhere in my formal or informal studies on weather and climate.

This is completely incorrect, and despite Leif’s efforts I don’t think he’s managed to articulate to Myrrh what the problem is.

Myrrh said:
“As I mentioned earlier, there is no internal consistency from AGWScience fiction inc. Because here they describe the molecules of our atmosphere as ideal gases, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, but exclude water vapour – why? Because they say water vapour is localised and doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for any length of time.. ??!”

The division is not made in the way Myrrh describes. All the other gases mentioned are ‘well-mixed’ which means that in the free troposphere (indeed, within the homosphere – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbopause) the relative abundance of these gases is about the same (busting another myth of Myrrh’s, but I wont go into it more now). Water vapour is not well-mixed – hence rainforests, deserts, very dry air in aeroplanes etc etc.

So the distinction is between well-mixed gases (most of them) and those that are spatially variable (highly reactive or precipitable ones, eg. water), not between gases that are considered ideal or non-ideal.

Myrrh says:
July 7, 2011 at 4:49 pmYou’re confusing ideal and real gases
I showed you with a very simple calculation what the empty space in the real gas Nitrogen is, namely 99.992%. In an ideal gas that percentage would by 100%. What in that calculation is it that you cannot follow? Give it a try. Explain each step as you understand it and shows us where you can’t follow anymore.

Stu N says:
July 7, 2011 at 5:31 pmMyrrh said:
“As I mentioned earlier, there is no internal consistency from AGWScience fiction inc. Because here they describe the molecules of our atmosphere as ideal gases, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, but exclude water vapour – why?
That is, of course, obvious [except for Myrrh] because water vapor condenses under normal conditions in the atmosphere and thus stops being a gas, and thus not an ideal gas. Cool air [nitrogen] to some -200 C and it too stops being an nearly ideal gas.

The planetary climate system is intrinsically a solar-driven thermodynamic one, with enthalpy serving to account for energy states (including work done by transmuted mechanical enegy) and with the profound priciple of entropy directing the energy flow through the material substances of the planet. Strangely, no reference is made to those key concepts.

Myrrh says:

And the land and the atmosphere, heat rises and cold sinks. Convection is the main method of heat transfer in our atmosphere – this is the fluid gas Air, thus convection not radiation – from which we get our weather, our winds are basically created when volumes of hot air rise to be replaced by volumes of cold air. Without a proper understanding of thermodynamics here it isn’t possible to understand, for example, how the Water Cycle is the real greenhouse gas for cooling the Earth as it takes the heat away into the cooler heights where water vapour condenses out and releases the heat, which always flows spontaneously from the hotter to the colder.

I’ve added a new category, “12. Physics – Other” and several of the important physics concepts under it including:

Very useful list, clearly demonstrating the unbelievable arrogance and ignorance of IPCC.
Just two comments:
1) I didn’t notice mentioned a crucial “CO2 increase = vegetation growth” feedback mechanism (increase of CO2 absorption by the plants due to the increase of plants’ growth due to the increase of CO2 content in the atmosphere), which negates any alleged increase of temperature due to the increase of CO2. May be it was included in some already listed category, I don’t know.

The specific references to Leif in the list are because he is the source of the references. If you reason to question the accuracy of these references or you have alternate sources that you think are better, please post them below for consideration.

It is, however, more of an argument for a warmist, specialist or elitist superiority in understanding or opinion, similar to one some of our post-war parents might have said to us as teenagers: what do you know? they (the government, the scientists, adults) know more than you do.

Not sure how you arrived there. I built the list to try to compile all the variables in one place and add it as a WUWT Reference Page so others could learn from it. My intent is to make a general understanding of Earth’s Climate System more accessible so more people will be in a position to rebut those who claim omnipotent knowledge of Earth’s Climate System. Take care in ascribing motives based on minimal context, as in this case, my intent and your perception of it, appear to be juxtaposed.

The science blogs such as WUWT depend on the acceptance of what has been in legal circles called the Reasonable Man Hypothesis. The RMH suggests that, with a reasonable amount of knowledge, analytical ability and life-world experience, a non-expert can get the sense of what is going on and make a sound judgement of what action should be pursued on that basis.

I agree to an extent, i.e if one is willing to do the homework. Certainly one does not need formal training in order to obtain “a reasonable amount of knowledge” about Earth’s Climate System. However, there is a tremendous amount to be learned and, in the case of Earth’s Climate System, “a reasonable amount of knowledge” should be measured in hundreds, and preferably thousands, of hours.

The climate debate is teaching an entire thinking world that they can, with some effort, determine the reasonableness of what is going on without having to own a closetful of white coats.

Yes, but remember that those with closets-full of white coats, often have brains-full of specialized knowledge, and a reasonable amount of a reasonable amount of knowledge is likely to come from said brains.

If less time was devoted to analysing the messenger and even a tiny bit more to following the message, you’d have nailed it, put some arnica on your thumb..

For example you say: The division is not made in the way Myrrh describes. All the other gases mentioned are ‘well-mixed’ which means that in the free troposphere ..the relative abundance of these gases is about the same (busting another myth of Myrrh’s, but I wont go into it more now). Water vapour is not well-mixed -hence rainforests, deserts, very dry air in aeroplanes etc etc.

Carbon dioxide is not well-mixed, see AIRS conclusion for the surprise this generated, or follow my explanations for the same effect here. I’ll stick with the example izen gave, in the hope that it will help you to focus. Do try and make the effort not to get sidetracked.

Firstly, what is my point? My point is that there is a phenomenon I have noticed through the years I have been following these arguments between ‘skeptics’ and ‘warmists’ which unites them both, I have called it AGWScience (fiction). As I have described above, AGWScience mixes and takes out of context ideas, concepts, laws, properties, processes from real well-known traditional science in order to promote its particular memes. Individually these are nonsense, taken together they create a whole new science fictional world of impossible physics, literature not science as someone said recently, ‘writings whose value lies in emotional effects’ being one of the meanings of ‘literature’. The whole production of AGWScience should be on the fiction shelves in any rationally organised library. It is science fiction masquerading as real science.

The problem is, it is presented to the world as if it is real, non-fiction, that it has confused even scientists.. So successful has been the promotion of this deceit, that its memes are taken for granted by those who don’t know any better and by scientists whose fields are outside the practical applications related to them. Because AGWScience covers the range of physical phenomena it is widespread that real scientists who can spot the disjunct between one of more memes and real physics in their own discipline, will take another meme as ‘fact’ believing it well-known’ because they hear it repeated so often.

That Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is “well-mixed’ in the atmosphere is a major meme from AGWScience fiction. It is an important meme because much of its fictional reasoning depends on that idea as a base. It promotes that idea by various references to laws and descriptions of properties and processes from the real world of physics. Its only interest is in promoting the memes, so anything from real science can be twisted and used to in order to give these memes a semblance of reality and to that end the first meme it promotes, unceasingly, is that it is real science and those promoting it are real scientists. There are many ways it promotes the fiction that CO2 is well mixed. One of these is taken descriptions applicable only to an ideal gas in reality and giving some of these to the gases in our atmosphere of importance to its general meme that CO2 drives temperature changes via radiation. It doesn’t care about water vapour, it doesn’t want anyone to think about water vapour, because water vapour destroys its fiction about radiation being the prime means of heat transfer. The Water Cycle is not included in AGWScience. AGWScience distracts from appreciating this.

What it does instead, one of the things its does, is promote some descriptions from ideal gas and by so thoroughly attaching these to descriptions of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in our atmosphere makes people believe in an impossible physical world, convinced that it is our physical reality. Let’s narrow this down to just one example.

The molecules of gas are moving at around 500m/s or about a THOUSANDD miles an hour. There is no way with those velocities you will get gases stratifying out by weight within the first few miles of the atmosphere.

And I gave examples from the real world and explanations from real traditional physics, that this claim from AGWScience is fiction. Let’s narrow that down to examples.

Read the examples I’ve given.

Discuss these examples and find more for yourselves.

Find which specific concepts from ideal gas descriptions have been used in creating this fiction.

Find which specific concepts from real traditional physics have been jettisoned in creating this fiction.

Myrrh says:
July 9, 2011 at 2:15 am“The molecules of gas are moving at around 500m/s or about a THOUSANDD miles an hour.”
And I gave examples from the real world and explanations from real traditional physics, that this claim from AGWScience is fiction.
Here is how real traditional physics calculate that speed:http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/kinetic/eqpar.html#c2
Enter 15C for the temperature and you’ll see that the real speed is 1414 mph for water vapor.

I have always wondered why scientists had to go to grad school! Now we know!

I am not sure what you mean, I haven’t gone to grad school. Furthermore, I disagree with your inference that one must have a formal education to be scientist. While it can certainly help, one can achieve the designation without it, i.e. “A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word. Scientists perform research toward a more comprehensive understanding of nature, including physical, mathematical and social realms.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientist

Now it is clear why people with little training are so easily confused.

I question whether “training” is the best way to learn about Earth’s Climate System. I think it’s better to actively identify the gaps in your knowledge and seek to fill them. With access to much of written human knowledge in a matter of a few keystrokes and some great professors hanging out in places like WUWT, one isn’t reliant upon trainers. Furthermore, a diversity of sources and opinions is advantageous when studying such an uncertain subject. I think it is better to be well researched, well read, well taught and well learned, than it is to be well trained…

I find pages like this, http://www.weatherquestions.com/What_is_water_vapor.htm quite saddening. Someone desperately trying to convey the real nature of the Water Cycle while constrained by AGWScience’s reach. I recall a couple of years ago someone linked to a page in the education basics section on the American Meteorological Society’s web site which clearly stated that CO2 did not drive temperatures. Within days the page disappeared, when increased traffic noted probably.

Leif says:
July 9, 2011 at 8:47 am

Here is now real traditional physics calculate that speed:… Enter 15C for the temperature and you’ll see that the real speed is 1414 mph for water vapor.

But how far is it moving at those speeds? I don’t notice the steam from my kettle zooming out the window at 1414 mph..

Now deal with the second part. The actual claim from AGWScience fiction based on this out of context reference to speeds: “There is no way with those velocities you will get gases stratifying out by weight within the first few miles of the atmosphere.”

The examples I refer to are those I gave earlier of carbon dioxide and methane separating out from the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in our atmosphere. Because, the first is heavier than Air, and the second, lighter – common knowledge in traditional real world physics.

Myrrh says:
July 9, 2011 at 12:36 pmBut how far is it moving at those speeds? I don’t notice the steam from my kettle zooming out the window at 1414 mph..
It is moving at that speed all the time between collisions with other molecules which happens billions of times per second. These collisions change the direction of the molecules all the time so it takes some time to actually get to your window, but it will get there, and the speed would still be 1414 mph [at 15C].

The examples I refer to are those I gave earlier of carbon dioxide and methane separating out from the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in our atmosphere. Because, the first is heavier than Air, and the second, lighter – common knowledge in traditional real world physics.
Actual measurements on top of high mountains, e.g. Mauna Loa shows the same CO2 concentration as at sea level. Measurements taken by aircraft also show very nearly constant mixing ratio [concentration] from 0 to 13 km height, with perhaps a very slight increase in the CO2 concentration with altitude.

Myrrh says:
July 7, 2011 at 4:49 pmYou’re confusing ideal and real gases
I showed you with a very simple calculation what the empty space in the real gas Nitrogen is, namely 99.992%. In an ideal gas that percentage would by 100%. Did you understand that calculation? If not, let us know at which point your understanding failed. If you did understand it, then you also understood that 99.992% of air is empty space, right?

Actually if one also considers the empty space between the atoms and between electrons and protons then the empty space is even more that that.

The issue is not that betwen ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ gases in any event.

The issue is that AGW theory ascribes a positive feedback to an increase in water vapour in the models whereas in the real world the feedbck is strongly negative whatever the source of a forcing process whether it be towards warming or cooling.

The water cycle speeds up to minimise warming influences and slows down to minimise cooling influences..

Thus the proportion of non water vapour GHGs in the air just goes primarily to the speed of the water cycle and is not a significant contributor to the equilibrium temperature of the system as a whole. We should look to the oceans and atmospheric pressure plus solar shortwave radiation to set that system equilibrium tewmperature and not the atmospheric composition.

In ignoring the influence of the oceans and atmospheric pressure, in focusing entirely on the atmosphere Tyndall et al got it seriously wrong.

The fact that the atmospheric temperature is higher than it ‘should’ be has hardly anything to do with atmospheric composition at all dur to the variable speed of the water cycle.

The entire system is modulated by the speed of the water cycle which is perfectly apparent from observation of the ever changing surface pressure distribution and the ever shifting climate zones.

Stephen Wilde says:
July 9, 2011 at 11:51 pm“99.992% of air is empty space, right?”
Actually if one also considers the empty space between the atoms and between electrons and protons then the empty space is even more that that.
The issue is not that betwen ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ gases in any event.
That ‘interior’ empty space [including that between the quarks inside the nucleons] is not accessible to other molecules. The ideal/real issue goes to the heart of Myrrh’s ignorance about physics and hence to the role of water vapor as well.

It is moving at that speed all the time between collisions with other molecules which happens billions of times per second. These collisions change the direction of the molecules all the time so it takes some time to actually get to your window, but it will get there, and the speed would still be 1414 mph [at 15C].

So, my kitchen is 16’x14’x8′, there are two windows opposite each other along the 16′ length, my kettle is adjacent to one of the windows, both windows are closed, the doors are closed, there are no fans going. How long will it take to get from one side to the other window? What speed is that?

Myrrh says:
July 11, 2011 at 1:19 pmHow long will it take to get from one side to the other window? What speed is that?
It will take several minutes, because each molecule undergoes billions of collisions per second at their high 1000 mph speed before they get there. See: http://www.3rd1000.com/chem101/chem102i.htm
And, yes, your Kitchen is 99.992% empty space.
Go through the elementary calculation I gave you of that number. If you have problems with a specific step, we’ll explain that to you when you tell us where you get stuck.

You’re full of it. You claim our atmosphere is empty space and that water vapour travels at 1414 mph through this and then say it doesn’t travel that fast because it’s making all these collisions on the way and then give me a reference to hydrogen sulphide taking several minutes to cross a room, unproven, assumed because of calculating on kinetic theory of gases. Although the chap has to revert to non-kinetic models for real calculations later.. So, let’s go with hydrogen sulphide – it’s slightly heavier than the fluid gas Air, how long will it take to cross from one side to the other, still given that there is no movement of Air at all, certainly no air “vigorously stirred by a mechanical fan”?

Come on Leif – let’s have some proof of real logic from you in this ideal gas empty space kinetic atmosphere of yours.

For anyone reading this and confused by Leif’s hubris in presuming to teach me when he knows nothing about the subject, and moreover showing no ability to think logically.. My kitchen is full of the fluid gas Air, it has weight, volume, is subject to gravity – all the stuff that ideal gases do not have. I can hear the kettle boiling, it is not empty space.. The water vapour is not travelling at 1414 mph through empty space but through a fluid gas Air which is exerting pressure of around a ton per square foot on every surface, but, because considerably lighter than Air, water vapour will rise, it is buoyant in Air. Without convection, and there are no windows open or fans going, movement sideways, to cross the room from one window to the other, will depend on such things as how fast it is being ejected from the kettle. It may never reach the other side. Even though water vapour is constantly evaporating at room temperature it’s movement is up, that’s what buoyant means.

Let’s go with the hydogen sulphide because slightly heavier than air it is more akin to carbon dioxide, which is one and a half times heavier, and brings us back to the point – the confusion between ideal gas and real gases from which we have Leif et al claiming our atmosphere is empty space because the gas molecules making up our atmosphere are unreal, imaginary ideal gases (the definition in real physics of an ideal gas) and so, that travelling at these high speeds gas molecules will travel across my kitchen taking only minutes because only delayed by ideal gas kinetic theory of gas molecules, only by statistics of bounces off each other, and, izen claiming that “there is no way with those velocities you will get gases stratifying out by weight within the first few miles of the atmosphere.”

But we do have gases stratifying out by weight within the first few miles of the atmosphere, we have that all the time, in our real world of real gases. Do your own searches on carbon dioxide heavier than air volcanoes and methane lighter than air mines, there’s still a wealth of fact available. This claim is not just falsified by real life and known real traditional physics, but it’s a claim that could never be made in real life in real physics. It’s stupid. The only reason it is believed by so many is because of the concerted effort to spread the meme from AGWScience that ideal gas describes the properties of real gases and the ideal gas law the processes. It has created an imaginary world of science fiction, in which belief, the real properties of our gases and the real processes and interactions are seen as alien, aren’t believed. And aren’t believed to the extent that the AGWScience fictional world is argued for so strongly that the real physical world can’t be grasped.

Hydrogen sulphide being slightly heavier than air will sink, displacing air. When whatever force that introduced it into a corner of a room has run its course, it will displace the air and sink. Just as carbon dioxide does.

Methane lighter than air will rise to the ceiling of a mine, separating out, stratifying. And will stay separated out for centuries and centuries and.., it will not ‘mix-thoroughly because it obeys ideal gas law and so bounces around off the other molecules and so travels across the mine’. Nor will the hydrogen sulphide take only minutes to cross the room, Leif’s link is to rubbish science.

REPLY: “you’re full of it” ?? I know Dr. Svalgaard personally, and I’ve never known him to link to “rubbish science”. And more importantly, unlike you he has the courage to put his name to his words, so I tend to give anything he might say more credence based on being upfront. Yes H2S will travel across a room in minutes, and I wasn’t laying on the floor when I smelled it my own personal experiments.

Not sure what you mean by making your day, Anthony. Just what does “escalating this argument further” mean? Does it mean I will be penalised for replying to your comments? Why? Is this a threat to censorship because you’ve taken umbrage? If so, and I have to say that’s how it reads to me, then you’re operating double standards here, one for your ‘mates’ and another for those you’re not really that keen on, it appears to me. I’ve seen several mods replying to complaints about Leif’s ad homs and so on, by saying such things as ‘we’ve got a very light handed policy of moderation here’ and Leif can say what he likes, be as rude as he likes; I’ve even come across references on other blogs to how he gets away with being rude as he likes on WUWT. As here, as he has in past discussions with me and several others I’ve noticed, full of arrogance and disdain to cover up his ignorance about a particular point, because oh, he’s a ‘scientist’. If that’s what you mean, how are you any different from the warmist blogs that censor? Except they don’t make a point of claiming they don’t censor. So what do you mean?

Let him fight his own battles. And if you want to argue the point with me, do it on even ground.

“Without convection, and there are no windows open or fans going, movement sideways, to cross the room from one window to the other, will depend on such things as how fast it is being ejected..”

“Hydrogen sulphide being slightly heavier than air will sink, displacing air. When whatever force that introduced it into a corner of a room has run its course, it will displace the air and sink. Just as carbon dioxide does.”

To get ‘well-mixed’ for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, AGWScience uses a combination of ‘Brownian’ motion and ‘ideal gas properties/law’ – hence the 99.992% empty space and molecules bouncing off each other without interacting – and they call this ‘diffusion’. The arguments for used to be/maybe still are, like scent travelling through a room, like ink poured into water – for the meme ‘diffused and thoroughly mixed and cannot be unmixed’.

The point to notice about diffusion first is scale – “molecular diffusion is relevant only on length scales between nanometer and millimeter.” And second, “diffusion dominates only in perfect thermal equilibrium.”

Steam from a kettle or hydrogen sulphide spreads through a room by convection. In the absence of convection, when the energy propelling has ceased and when there is no other work being done to move these such as fans stirring up the air or currents from open windows, they will revert back to their basic properties relative to the molecules of Air, the real gas molecules nitrogen and oxygen. The lighter water vapour will rise, the heavier hydrogen sulphide will sink. The hydrogen sulphide being not much heavier than air will not sink so dramatically as does carbon dioxide. You can make your own carbon dioxide from ingredients you have in the kitchen and try it for yourselves by pouring it over a lit candle, it will put out the flame because it displaces oxygen.

As I said earlier, AGWScience doesn’t like convection. If it admits such a thing as convection exists it would detract from its meme that heat transfer is only by electromagnetic radiation and it could no longer ignore that water vapour in the atmosphere is the main greenhouse method of cooling the atmosphere – and all the other claims it has built on the false assumption that the real gases of our atmosphere are the imaginary ‘ideal’ and all encounters ‘kinetic’.. It’s not until you put all the AGWScience’s basic memes together that you realise the extent of this fictional world it has created. It’s truly, extraordinarily, absurd.

Myrrh says:
July 12, 2011 at 3:19 amYou claim our atmosphere is empty space and that water vapour travels at 1414 mph through this and then say it doesn’t travel that fast because it’s making all these collisions on the way and then give me a reference to hydrogen sulphide
Every physicists would say what I just did. This is standard high-school physics, known for centuries. And it makes no difference which gas you use. The sulfide has the nice feature that you can smell it.
Even you should be able to understand the empty space argument. Let us start with a simple example: take a bag with a volume of 1 cubic meter [out in empty space, so it contains 100% empty space, that is 1 million little cubic centimeters of empty space, because 1 meter is 100 centimeter, and the volume is thus 100*100*100 cubic centimeters]. Now put in the bag ten little cubes one centimeter on the side of any material you like.How much of the bag is now empty space? If you will not answer this, you have lost the argument. If you are unable, just say so and we’ll go even slower. Once we have past that hurdle we’ll continue with the next step.

??! What on earth do you think you’re saying, Leif? Do quit pretending you know what you’re talking about, it’s become really, really, tedious.

If there’s anyone else who’s having a problem with the difference between ideal and real gases, that ideal gases have no properties like volume, try thinking of it by appreciating that our atmosphere is practically, by dry weight, 100% nitrogen and oxygen. These are actually, real ‘things’, they take up space, i.e. they have volume and from volume, weight, are subject to gravity and so on. Nitrogen and Oxygen are gases, together these are the gas Air. Air as a gas is a fluid, so are liquids like water fluids, convection applies in heat transfer. Ideal gas has no real gas properties, it is a construct, an imaginary hard dot taking up no space and having no interactions with other molecules, for example, an ideal oxygen ‘molecule’ will bounce off on meeting an ideal carbon molecule unable to form carbon dioxide. Because Ideal gas molecule have no attraction, etc. and the only result is creation of heat while the molecules remain unchanged, kinetic theory.

This description was something thought of in the early days of exploring gases, it’s basic nonsense – don’t be fooled by the oft seen ‘how real gases deviate from ideal behaviour’… No real gas obeys the ideal gas law – because an ideal gas does not exist. You’ll have to go through quite tortuous mathematical route adding back real life when you begin with the ideal gas equation.. Waals was the first to get to the nub of the problem previous thinking had mangled – http://www.chemistryexplained.com/Te-Va/van-der-Waals-Johannes.html

This reminds me of the Arrenhius nonsense, and there’s a discussion about it on wuwt, that AGWScience take an earlier version of his thoughts because it fits in with the claims they want to make, regardless that a few years later Arrenhius himself said he was wrong, and regardless that later analysis by others showed that Arrenhius was completely wrong. If you begin your thinking from an AGWScience meme, you’re going to get terribly confused about how the real world looks and acts..

To appreciate volume of the gas Air in which we live, i.e. that it takes up space, has weight etc., the best description is to imagine one is standing at the bottom of a swimming pool with ten feet of water above, then, imagine going into an open field – the volume of the real gas Air, the real entity all around and pressing down on you, is like that, air has volume, weight. It’s not empty space around us. ‘Empty’ space begins to appear the higher one gets in the atmosphere – but of course, there are some who say that even this isn’t empty…

Myrrh says:
July 12, 2011 at 11:55 pmWhat on earth do you think you’re saying, Leif? Do quit pretending you know what you’re talking about, it’s become really, really, tedious.
You are right, it is tedious. You cannot get off your misconceptions without first doing the exercise I described. This goes to basic understanding of concepts.
So one more time:
Let us start with a simple example: take a bag with a volume of 1 cubic meter [out in empty space, so it contains 100% empty space, that is 1 million little cubic centimeters of empty space, because 1 meter is 100 centimeter, and the volume is thus 100*100*100 cubic centimeters]. Now put in the bag ten little cubes one centimeter on the side of any material you like.How much of the bag is now empty space?

We are not walking through empty space in the fluid volume of gaseous Air around us any more than we are swimming in empty space in the fluid volume of liquid water when we go scuba diving. There is no sound in empty space – sound travels through air similarly as the energy of a wave travels through water, the body, the volume, of water doesn’t move but stays where it is, the wave is energy being passed through – like a Mexican Wave. [A wave in the ocean is not a volume of water travelling – in this it differs from wind which is a volume of air travelling.]

It’s a matter of scale, molecules travelling at great speeds are not travelling great distances, diffusion is on a nano scale. The molecules which have volume are constrained by the molecules with volume around them. It’s molecules vibrating on the spot and hitting adjacent molecules with volume which passes along sound. [Wind is actual volumes of local air moving, as I’ve described above.]

You have to bear in mind that AGWScience is simply the production department of memes out of whatever concepts are available, they do not represent reality, neither individually nor in combination, and there is no internal consistency between them because of this. You can’t get from their imaginary ideal gas atmosphere to convection of heat transfer in our real gaseous one – hence no need for thermodynamics in its imaginary climate.. And, it doesn’t much care how many people are busy busy busy arguing that our atmosphere is ideal gas therefore carbon dioxide is well-mixed and can’t be separated out and can therefore accumulate for hundreds and thousands of years – all it’s interested in is passing on junk science memes. Here’s an example:

You would do well to remember, at least to consider, that AGWScience is not interested in enlightening you about the world, but is geared up to creating as much ignorance about it as it can; the more confusion it creates, the more arguments, the better it achieves its objective. This new batch of kids when they grow up will be telling the aging defenders of the ideal gas meme that it’s nonsense that carbon dioxide doesn’t displace air and sink, but they may well believe it is a poison, because that’s the meme being re-inforced to the teachers – “Deadly Incidents of CO2 Poisoning”.

And the link to the Poisonous Volcanic Gas Video takes you to “Teachers on the Leading Edge” http://orgs.up.edu/totle/index.php?q=node/400 and “Poisonous Volcanic Gas Demo”, which is the first demo on the pdf compilation on the heavier than air carbon dioxide. Actually, a very good experiment that anyone can do at home.

The traditional science category distinction between poisonous and non-poisonous is deliberately confused. Carbon dioxide is non-toxic, not poisonous, compare carbon monoxide which is toxic. Carbon dioxide kills by suffocation. The water a person drowns in is not toxic, the pillow used to suffocate, is not toxic (although the perpetrator of such an act might well be..). All in the cause to demonise carbon dioxide, real science is deliberately mangled. Just as it is mangled by taking ideal gas law out of context to create a fictitious atmosphere where radiation prevails in empty space and heavier than air carbon dioxide accumulates, and convection and real thermodynamics don’t happen. So here the meme that the actually benign carbon dioxide which is the building block of us carbon life forms in the Carbon Life Cycle, is instead a poison, is being brainwashed into the supposedly ‘leading edge’ teachers.

What hope for those children to understand the complexities of climate when they grow up with no idea of the real world? Very efficient, takes more time, but less messy than book burning knowledge and mass slaughter of the teachers as in Russia, China and Cambodia in the last century.

So be careful out there, AGWScience mangles the very basic concepts and out of these false assumptions, false premises, builds an impossible through the looking glass with Alice world, but a toxic one, poisoning the mind…

Myrrh says:
July 13, 2011 at 2:54 amSo be careful out there, AGWScience mangles the very basic concepts and out of these false assumptions, false premises
This is just nonsense and the wrong way of fighting AGW. Let us see how your basic concepts fare: Let us start with a simple example: take a bag with a volume of 1 cubic meter [out in empty space, so it contains 100% empty space, that is 1 million little cubic centimeters of empty space, because 1 meter is 100 centimeter, and the volume is thus 100*100*100 cubic centimeters]. Now put in the bag ten little cubes one centimeter on the side of any material you like.How much of the bag is now empty space?
This should be easy for you.

Hugo M says:
July 13, 2011 at 6:11 amI looked for an updated Solar Polar Field / Rmax graph at your site, but couldn’t find any. Does this mean that this relation does not hold any more?
The relation is between the polar fields at minimum and Rmax for the next cycle. As the minimum is now passed, the prediction will not change, hence no update. But I am not sure exactly which graph you are referring to.

Your statement in the first paragraph, “I have been studying Earth’s climate system for several years and have found it to be a ridiculously complex, continually evolving and sometimes chaotic beast,” is incorrect. The closing phrase should read, “and always chaotic beast.

The form of the partial differential equations that need to be solved in order to understand the aerodynamics of the atmosphere ALWAYS result in chaotic behavior. Small deviations in initial conditions, choice of grid construction and time steps will result in markedly different model predictions.

I was very deliberate in choosing “sometimes chaotic”, as I didn’t want to imply that Earth’s climate system is completely chaotic. Certainly there are chaotic occurrences occurring continuously within it, but the overall system seems to maintain a semblance of order and balance in-between its chaotic swings.

which can definitely have climatic impacts, e.g. “black carbon in soot is the dominant absorber of visible solar radiation in the atmosphere. Anthropogenic sources of black carbon, although distributed globally, are most concentrated in the tropics where solar irradiance is highest. Black carbon is often transported over long distances, mixing with other aerosols along the way. The aerosol mix can form transcontinental plumes of atmospheric brown clouds, with vertical extents of 3 to 5 km. Because of the combination of high absorption, a regional distribution roughly aligned with solar irradiance, and the capacity to form widespread atmospheric brown clouds in a mixture with other aerosols, emissions of black carbon are the second strongest contribution to current global warming, after carbon dioxide emissions. In the Himalayan region, solar heating from black carbon at high elevations may be just as important as carbon dioxide in the melting of snowpacks and glaciers. The interception of solar radiation by atmospheric brown clouds leads to dimming at the Earth’s surface with important implications for the hydrological cycle, and the deposition of black carbon darkens snow and ice surfaces, which can contribute to melting, in particular of Arctic sea ice.”http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n4/abs/ngeo156.html

however, in terms of nucleation sources;
“Aerosols play a critical role in the formation of clouds. Clouds form as parcels of air cool and the water vapor in them condenses, forming small liquid droplets of water. However, under normal circumstances, these droplets form only where there is some “disturbance” in the otherwise “pure” air. In general, aerosol particles provide this “disturbance”. The particles around which cloud droplets coalesce are called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or sometimes “cloud seeds”. Amazingly, in the absence of CCN, air containing water vapor needs to be “supersaturated” to a humidity of about 400% before droplets spontaneously form! So, in almost all circumstances, aerosols play a vital role in the formation of clouds.”http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/aerosol_cloud_nucleation_dimming.html

Maybe you should just give an answer to the physics exercise that Dr Svalgaard posted, instead of continuing your increasingly ignorant rants.

Oh, that was a physics exercise, was it? Looked to me like a typical Leif distraction, irrelevant plus ad hom, hubris, to distract from the fact that he’s learned something..

My last encounter with Leif I also took him seriously, thought I would get a good exchange of ideas with him. That time, he pretended to know all about relativity … He came in with an objection to something I said about general relativity and told me it was x and I should read a page he linked to, I read it, and replied that his answer wasn’t relevant to general relativity and the page he linked even said that it wasn’t about general relativity, so what did he mean? He refused to answer.

Ref my “So be careful out there, AGWScience mangles the very basic concepts and out of these false assumption, false premises”

this is just nonsense and the wrong way of fighting AGW.

!? I’ve given examples.. I realise you’re not at all familiar with these so as I said, we could go through it more slowly. For example, I’ve shown quite conclusively that izen’s claim, based on AGWScience false science premise, the meme that carbon dioxide and oxygen and nitrogen are ideal gases, that carbon dioxide doesn’t stratify out – is wrong . I’ve given examples from real life and even an experiment you can do in your own kitchen, to show that carbon dioxide is heavier than air and separates out. Carbon dioxide is a real gas, it has weight, volume, it takes up space, ideal gases have none of these real world properties – they take up no room in empty space..
Our atmosphere is not empty space, it is filled with gases which have volume, weight, interactions, etc. It is a fluid gas exerting pressure on us and subject to gravity – AGWScience fiction has an atmosphere of nothing with gas molecules just hard dots which bounce off each other – – this totally stupid fiction is being taught in schools – I think it is very important to point out that this is a typical way that AGScience fiction changes real science, real physics. By mangling and taking laws out of context, assigning different properties to things, and so on. It should be fought on this front. It takes someone who knows real physics very well to keep churning this stuff out – its own magisterium…

Great project!
In the future I hope the following information can be included for all the parameters:
1. Cycles: What are the cycles for each parameter?
2. Variability: What is the change of magnitude during a cycle?
3. Relevance: How sensitive is earth’s climate to each parameter?

I know the IPCC has all this information and the climate models run on it. I’d just like to have it all in one place…

Irony off: Wouldn’t it be great to give estimates wherever we can come up with one?

Myrrh says:
July 16, 2011 at 12:05 pmCarbon dioxide is a real gas, it has weight, volume, it takes up space, ideal gases have none of these real world properties – they take up no room in empty space..
Our atmosphere is not empty space, it is filled with gases which have volume, weight,…

The purpose of the exercise was to teach you about volumes. Let me repeat:
take a bag with a volume of 1 cubic meter [out in empty space, so it contains 100% empty space, that is 1 million little cubic centimeters of empty space, because 1 meter is 100 centimeter, and the volume is thus 100*100*100 cubic centimeters]. Now put in the bag ten little cubes one centimeter on the side of any material you like. How much of the bag is now empty space?

Since you don’t seem to know what empty means we can start by defining that. If a test particle with non-zero cross-section [i.e. one with its own volume] can travel forever in all directions in a space without ever colliding with any other particles, we say that that space is empty of particles.

Now on to the example. Since the bag has a volume of 100,00,00 cubic centimeters and we put in ten little cubes [each with volume and weight] of each 1 cc for a total volume of 10 cc, there are 100,00,00 – 10 = 99,99,90 cc left, so the empty part [i.e. not occupied by any little cubes] is now 99.999%.

Now on to a real gas. Let us take 1 cubic meter of Nitrogen at 1 atm pressure [which makes up most of our atmosphere]. To capitalize on what you just learned about volumes we ask: “what is the volume of the those real molecules of Nitrogen in that one cubic meter of the real gas Nitrogen. One way of calculating the volume is to realize that one molecule of the real gas N2 has volume and weight. So we can calculate the total volume of all the N2 molecules by multiplying the volume of ONE molecule by the number of molecules in our one cubic meter of the real gas N2. firt the volume of one molecule. As an approximation we’ll assume that the molecule is roughly spherical with a radius R. What is R? This link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_radius gives R for N2 as 0.225 nanometers. Other links give 0.1 to 0.25 nm. We’ll take the larger values to take into account that interactions between real gas molecules make them look larger than they are. So the effective radius will be taken as 0.25 nm. This gives us a volume of 4pi/3*(0.25E-9)^3 = 6.54E-29 cubic meter. How many molecules are there in that cubic meter? Well, as a real gas it has weight [mass], in fact 1.25 kg under normal atmospheric temperature and sea level pressure. As N2 consists of 28 nucleons [protons and neutrons plus electrons that don’t weigh much] we can take the weight of one molecule as 28*weight of one neutron or 28*1.675E−27 = 4.7E-26 kg. So, the total number of N2 molecules comes to 1.25/4.7E-26 = 2.7E+25. Recall that one molecule has a volume of 6.54E-29 cubic meter, so the total volume of all the molecules in that 1 cubic meter becomes 2.7E+25*6.54E-29 = 0.00175 cubic meter. Meaning that there is 1 – 0.00175 = 0.99825 cubic meters not occupied by any molecules or by anything else, i.e. is empty. This matches well what the link to Van der Waals said about a real gas: ” In general, at normal laboratory temperatures and pressures, the atoms or molecules of a gas only occupy about 1/1000 of the volume of the gas, the rest being empty space”.

In that empty space the molecules move at high speed [1000 mph]. Even so, diffusion is a slow process, but convection, turbulence, and ‘eddy diffusion’ ensure that gases are mixed well throughout the atmosphere below the tropopause. Direct measurements of the mixing ratios by high flying aircraft and balloons confirm this expectation and empirically we simply find that the inert gases [Helium, Neon, Xenon, etc] are well mixed, thus there is to first order no gravitational separation. Whatever changes there are, are controlled by other factor, such as e.g. for water vapor that condenses out of the atmosphere, the mixing ratio, of course, falls to near zero in the stratosphere. For ozone that is created in the stratosphere, the mixing ratio is also different. For CO2, direct measurements http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/10/7659/2010/acp-10-7659-2010.pdf show that once you are away from direct sources near the surface, there is very little decrease of the concentration with altitude.
All this is well-known and pertains to real gases as shown by real measurements and is real science.

Leif is explaining that in the troposphere there is enough convection, turbulence and ‘eddy diffusion’ to overcome the stratification that would otherwise occur from gravitational effects alone. It is a pity that he could not put it so simply.

The situation is slightly different from tropopause upwards because there is less convection, turbulence and ‘eddy diffusion’ above that level and so a greater degree of stratification but even there there is a mix of slow overturning processes such as the Brewer Dobson Circulation.

The reason for the effectiveness of such mixing processes in the troposphere is the sheer amount of empty space between molecules in the atmosphere which gives enough freedom for those mixing processes to have the observed effect for any gases that have a longer residence time than water vapour molecules. Hence the general validity of treating real gases as if they were ideal gases.

Water vapour is very different as you point out because the molecules are constantly being recycled by evaporation and condensation on a very short timescale. I think the residence time of a water molecule is ten days or so but I haven’t checked that recently.

So your basic point that water vapour should be dealt with differently is correct but that is nothing to do with the difference between ideal and real gases. Instead one’s attention should be directed to the power of the evaporation/condensation process in mopping up all surplus energy from IR in the air that is not transported upwards by convection conduction and radiation.

If water vapour and the water cycle are treated correctly then it can readily be seen that the speed of the water cycle is highly variable and very responsive to changes in the energy content of the system at the sea/air interface and at the tropopause.

Such changes in the speed of the water cycle ensure that whenever ANY forcing tries to increase or decrease the natural background differential (dictated by landmass distribution) between sea surface and surface air temperatures then the speed of the water cycle changes to act as a negative system response acting against that forcing process to largely or completely cancel it.

There are only two system changes that can overcome the negative regulatory effects of the variable speed for the water cycle and they are net solar shortwave radiation into the oceans and atmospheric pressure.

The key to the whole climate conundrum is therefore net solar shortwave into the ocean because atmospheric pressure does not change significantly from changes in atmospheric composition.

It turns out that net solar shortwave into the ocean is highly sensitive to global albedo changes via cloudiness variations and as I have said elsewhere those cloudiness changes are highly sensitive to external solar variations (other than raw TSI) and internal oceanic variations.
Changes in composition of the atmosphere from variations in GHG quantities would have an effect but vanishingly small compared to the natural solar and oceanic changes.

Steven, you are probably running ahead a bit too fast for Mirrh, who it still contemplating the nature of ’empty’.

But it seems that youa are also running way ahead when you are drawing far-reaching conclusions like :The key to the whole climate conundrum is therefore net solar shortwave into the ocean because atmospheric pressure does not change significantly from changes in atmospheric composition.
This seems entirely premature and almost ad-hoc, compared to Dr.Svalgaard’s extremely thorough and basic explanation of why gasses in our atmosphere behave like ideal gasses.

Maybe you can slow it down a bit, and explain what exactly you mean when you claimThere are only two system changes that can overcome the negative regulatory effects of the variable speed for the water cycle and they are net solar shortwave radiation into the oceans and atmospheric pressure.
which you seem to seems to come completely out of thin air.
I think I prefer Dr.Svalgaard’s more thorough approach over your premature assertions.

izen says:
July 4, 2011 at 3:16 am
The evidence so far is observational. The measured rise in anthropogenic CO2. The measured absoprtion spectrum of CO2. The measured increase and spectal change in downwelling longwave radiation. The measured drop and spectral change in outgoing LW radiation.
And the measured rise in land and sea surface temperatures, the rise in sea level, the fall in glacier mass balance, the loss of polar sea ice, the increase in atmospheric water vapour, the decrease in snow cover and the various biological changes in growing times and extent for plants and animals.

The observations above are facts not in question, but the causitive connection is in question in this AGW debate. And you have only three independent “facts” here: that CO2 is going up, that CO2 absorbs longwave radiation, and that the temperature has risen globally 0.7C. The rest – melting ice and snow, growing times and ranges, rises in sea-level and rises in outgoing radiation, are all CONSEQUENCES of a global temperature rise.

For CAGW to exist, CO2 must
1) have a very large to unlimited longwave radiation source to absorb (If LWR is less than CO2, the heating ability will decrease with time),
2) create, with water vapour, a significant (2 – 3X) feedback effect on temperature,
3) have a warming power in the absence of or to a much greater power relative to an in-built negative feedback mechanism, and
4) be operating at a time when “normal” processes, i.e. not CO2 caused, are NOT operating (unlike the 1860 – 1930 period).

If any of these four things can be demonstrated either false or with only a portion of their purported influence, then CAGW falls down to some AGW of an amount nonfixable without a total shutdown of the world’s human activity.

Right now Australia is moving to institute CO2 punitive actions that will, by their own admission, have no measurable impact (by themselves) on the forecast temperature rise of the globe. This is a noble effort, but like the Charge of the Light Brigade, drama without reason. Unless A-CO2 is a very strong creation of rising temperatures (including the purported feedback), a 20% or so decrease in our CO2 emissions will do nothing at great cost financially and in terms of self-realization. If you believe that the human race is a virus to be irradicated, or that we must “deindustrialize the economy”, as Hansen and Strong have said, then a weak influence on climate by CO2 can certainly be forced by a reversion to an 18th century world. But if you think that a “reasonable” target of emissions-reduction of 20 – 30% is something we can afford, technically do and have the economic-social will to do, then you must have a powerful CO2 villain to attack.

I state again that there are no measurements to say that the 4 points necessary for CAGW are true, only models. The uncertainty within each one covers off the alternate theories, that changes in insolation (i.e. albedo) or the heat exchange system between the oceans and the atmosphere are responsible for THE MAJORITY of the planet’s heating over the last 50 years.

Ice melting says nothing about CO2. It only says that heat from somewhere is entering ice masses.

The list is so long and the comments so varied that one does not know whether important items were missed.
However, I was looking in vain for the important work by Landscheidt, Fairbridge, Mackey, José, Wilson, Niroma, and Charvàtovà on the 178 year SIM cycle. I see no mention of the planetary orbital influences on the nature of the path of the sun around the centre of the solar system, and the concomitant correlation of the SIM cycle with the solar minima of the last millennium. There are thoughts that the poloidal and toroidal solar magnetic field of the solar dynamo(s) (de Jager/Duhau) are influenced by the cyclical proximity of the “heavy” planets with their own magnetic fields. Both magnetics and gravity may be involved. In any case, the topic supplies a straight correlation to the Wolf, Spörer, Maunder, Dalton and coming “Landscheidt minimum”.
It deserves all attention.
Si non è vera, è bon trovato.

This is what I like so much about WUWT. Everyone seems have a lot of wild opinons, but there is no substance.

Stephen Wilde has a “Hot Water Bottle Effect” theory and out of the blue claims there “There are only two system changes that can overcome the negative regulatory effects of the variable speed for the water cycle and they are net solar shortwave radiation into the oceans and atmospheric pressure.”. OP “Just The Facts” (what’s your real name?) suggests that sea ice retreat is caused by icebreakers from scientific excusions and sewer disposals from cruise ships and throws in everything but the kitchen sink to show that this climate system is so “rediculously complex”, carefully avoiding any mention of core elements of AGW. Meanwhile, Myrrh contemplates the very essence of reality as an argument to deny basic scientific facts.

What you seem to have in common is your ability to make definite statements without a scientific argument. Where are the scientific papers for your pet theory Stephen ? And where is your quantification of the effects of gravity waves or ice breakers on the Arctic sea ice extent ?

That’s why I like Svalgaard. He explains the basics and quantifies the effects. That’s what scientists do. Something you guys can learn a lot from.

No have fun debunking the CAGW theory. Don’t forget to define “CAGW” first, because this is term does not show up in scientific literature. Enjoy.

I am often amused by claims that we understand Earth’s climate system, are able to accurately measure its behavior, eliminate all potential variables except CO2 as the primary driver of Earth’s temperature and make predictions of Earth’s temperature decades into the future, all with a high degree of confidence.

Please show me one reputable, peer reviewed piece of research that makes this claim? You invalidated your entire post in the first paragraph. Well done.

Just a fyi, I frequently go to the Smithsonian Large Holocene Eruptions page and then follow up by looking at the Find Eruptions By Date page and it is always telling.

Yes, volcanoes are certainly an important part of the climate system, i.e.:

“The effects of recent volcanic eruptions on winters are modest in scale but historically their effects have been significant.

Most recently, the 1991 explosion of Mount Pinatubo, a stratovolcano in the Philippines, cooled global temperatures for about 2–3 years.[2]

In 1883, the explosion of Krakatoa (Krakatau) created volcanic winter-like conditions. The next four years after the explosion were unusually cold, and the winter of 1887 to 1888 included powerful blizzards.[3] Record snowfalls were recorded worldwide.

The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, a stratovolcano in Indonesia, occasioned mid-summer frosts in New York State and June snowfalls in New England and Newfoundland and Labrador in what came to be known as the “Year Without a Summer” of 1816.

A paper written by Benjamin Franklin in 1783 blamed the unusually cool summer of 1783 on volcanic dust coming from Iceland, where the eruption of Laki volcano had released enormous amounts of sulfur dioxide, resulting in the death of much of the island’s livestock and a catastrophic famine which killed a quarter of the population. Temperatures in the northern hemisphere dropped by about 1 °C in the year following the Laki eruption.

In 1600, the Huaynaputina in Peru erupted. Tree ring studies show that 1601 was cold. Russia had its worst famine in 1601 to 1603. From 1600 to 1602, Switzerland, Latvia and Estonia had exceptionally cold winters. The wine harvest was late in 1601 in France, and in Peru and Germany wine production collapsed. Peach trees bloomed late in China, and Lake Suwa in Japan froze early.[4]

In 1452 or 1453, a cataclysmic eruption of the submarine volcano Kuwae caused worldwide disruptions.

The Great Famine of 1315–1317 in Europe may have been precipitated by a volcanic event,[5] perhaps that of Kaharoa, New Zealand, which lasted about five years.[6]

Try reading through the thread before you comment, you might actually learn something…

I’ve read the thread, bucko, and Wikipedia still doesn’t count. If you aren’t prepared to back up your assertions with real research and honest reporting, then don’t expect to convince anybody who doesn’t inhabit your echo chamber.

Stephen Wilde said I referred you to two articles of mine each of which referred to relevant scientific papers.

Well, I looked through the two articles of yours, and found references to other articles of yours and a link to a WUWT post explaining how ‘skeptics’ should argue about Global Warming. No papers that support your theory of the “Hot Water Bottle Effect”. If I missed it, then by all means, please post it directly. Otherwise, stop fooling yourself with a cherry-picked theory and wake up from your Dunning-Kruger slumber.

Talking about the Arctic… Don’t you guys have ANY science to back up your increasingly irrelevant opinion ?

You seem to be struggling to comprehend and respond to the question I posed, let’s try again. There is ample evidence that, “perennial sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean decreased by 23 percent during the past two winters as strong winds swept more Arctic ice than usual out Fram Strait near Greenland. The study relied on 50 years of data from the International Arctic Buoy Program, currently directed by Ignatius Rigor of the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory, and eight years of data from NASA’s QuikScat satellite, a review of which was led by Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”

“The most important thing about this paper is that it foretells this summer’s record minimum ice extent in the Arctic,” Rigor, a research scientist and co-author on the paper, says. “While the total area of ice cover in recent winters has remained about the same, during the past two years an increased amount of older, thicker perennial sea ice was swept by winds out of the Arctic Ocean into the Greenland Sea. What grew in its place in the winters between 2005 and 2007 was a thin veneer of first-year sea ice, which simply has less mass to survive the summer melt.”http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=36894

it states that “The winter AO-index explains as much as 64% of the variance in summer sea-ice extent in the Eurasian sector, but the winter and summer AO-indices combined explain less than 20% of the variance along the Alaskan coast, where the age of sea-ice explains over 50% of the year-to year variability. If this interpretation is correct, low summer sea-ice extents are likely to persist for at least a few years. However, it is conceivable that, given an extended interval of low-index AO conditions, ice thickness and summertime sea-ice extent could gradually return to the levels characteristic of the 1980′s.”

used “geostrophic winds derived from reanalysis data to calculate the Fram Strait ice area export back to 1957, finding that the sea ice area export recently is about 25 % larger than during the 1960’s.”

“Observations reveal a strong correlation between the ice fluxes through the Fram Strait and the cross-strait air pressure difference.”

“Although the 1950s and 1990s stand out as the two decades with maximum flux variability, significant variations seem more to be the rule than the exception over the whole period considered.”

“A noticeable fall in the winter air pressure of 7 hPa is observed in the Fram Strait and the Barents Sea during the last five decades.”

“The corresponding decadal maximum change in the Arctic Ocean ice thickness is of the order of 0.8 m. These temporal wind-induced variations may help explain observed changes in portions of the Arctic Ocean ice cover over the last decades. Due to an increasing rate in the ice drainage through the Fram Strait during the 1990s, this decade is characterized by a state of decreasing ice thickness in the Arctic Ocean.”

Count for what? It is simply an information source, and, as any other, should be viewed with healthy skepticism.

If you aren’t prepared to back up your assertions with real research and honest reporting

Hilarious, I researched and posted a list of climatic variables. This post and associated comments are the most link saturated I have ever seen. I’ve also built a number of WUWT’s reference pages;http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/

so that the facts are readily available to anyone who wants to see them. Can you provide a link to what you consider to be an article that is backed up with “real research and honest reporting”?

The purpose of the exercise was to teach you about volumes. Let me repeat: take a bag with a volume of 1 cubic meter …

No, please don’t. I get so very bored with you avoiding the points I’m making, and am quite saddened there there are some who can’t see that this is what you are doing. There was a discussion not long ago where someone was saying about either Gavin or Trenberth or of their ilk, that they never answered the question asked of them, but would always sidestep it, tweak it around in a make-believe that the question was being answered, but it never was, exactly what you and some others I’ve come across do in these discussions.. You’re doing it here. To remind you for the last time, it is I who am teaching you about volumes, specifically, that real gases have this and you keep describing an imaginary world of ideal gas which doesn’t.. You have clearly shown zilch understanding of this because you’re confusing an imaginary ideal gas scenario of ideal gases taking up no room in empty space unconstrained except by mixing by bouncing off each other while travelling at great speeds, with the real physical world where gases have real volume which interact and are subject to constraints.

A f[*]rt does not travel across a room because of the imaginary movement of dimensionless molecules randomly bouncing off each other in all directions in empty space, but by convection through a fluid gas Air which has volume and weight because each gas molecule comprising it has volume and weight.

Encarta : volume 1. PHS SPACE INSIDE AN OBJECT the size of a three-dimensional space enclosed within or occupied by an object.

Encarta: weight 4. PHS FORCED CAUSED BY GRAVITY the vertical force experienced by a mass because of gravity.

COD: weight 1. Force with which body tends to centre of attraction, esp. (of terrestrial things) degree of downward tendency in body produced as resultant of earth’s gravitation and centrifugal force (the weight of a body varies with latitude and altitude but its mass does not)

Unless something is moving it the volume which is an individual gas molecule of or in Air is constrained by gravity and by the other volumes of molecules around it. Limitations imposed on movement or action, constraint, are relative.

Compare your descriptions of molecules with no properties taking only minutes to spread throughout a room as if ideal gases in empty space with the very clear description of Air as volumes of molecules coming back to rest after a sound wave has set them in motion. They do not move at great speeds through empty space, but are constrained by the volumes and weights of the other molecules adjacent to them. They may well be moving at great speeds on the spot, but not through the barrier of the very real physical volumes of gas molecules around them.

It takes work, energy, force, to set the individual volumes of molecules in motion through Air. The force which is weight of the heavier than air carbon dioxide volume displaces the air around it, it forces its way to the ground. It stays there unless a greater force moves it.

Myrrh says:
July 21, 2011 at 8:33 pmThey do not move at great speeds through empty space, but are constrained by the volumes and weights of the other molecules adjacent to them. They may well be moving at great speeds on the spot, but not through the barrier of the very real physical volumes of gas molecules around them.
They are constrained by collisions with other molecules. As I demonstrated in the real gas Nitrogen, the volumes of all the molecules in one cubic meter is 0.00175 cubic meter, the rest , 0.99825 cubic meter, is empty space. For an ideal gas the volume of the molecules would have been 0.00000 cubic meter, the rest, 1.00000 cubic meter would have been empty space. So, you can see how close the real gas Nitrogen is to being ideal.

It takes work, energy, force, to set the individual volumes of molecules in motion
The correct statement is ‘to set the individual molecules in motion’ as it are the molecules that move, not their volume. And the molecules have that energy because they are not at absolute zero, in fact, one molecule has the energy 20.7 yJ per degree Kelvin of temperature. Here you can see the movements: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Translational_motion.gif

that “act as cloud condensation nuclei, they alter albedo (both directly and indirectly via clouds) and hence Earth’s radiation budget, and they serve as catalysts of or sites for atmospheric chemistry reactions.”

“Aerosols play a critical role in the formation of clouds. Clouds form as parcels of air cool and the water vapor in them condenses, forming small liquid droplets of water. However, under normal circumstances, these droplets form only where there is some “disturbance” in the otherwise “pure” air. In general, aerosol particles provide this “disturbance”. The particles around which cloud droplets coalesce are called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or sometimes “cloud seeds”. Amazingly, in the absence of CCN, air containing water vapor needs to be “supersaturated” to a humidity of about 400% before droplets spontaneously form! So, in almost all circumstances, aerosols play a vital role in the formation of clouds.”http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/aerosol_cloud_nucleation_dimming.html

remain in the stratosphere for only a few months, they have only minor climatic effects, and they can be spread around the world by high-altitude winds. This suspended material contributes to spectacular sunsets.

which reacts with OH and water in the stratosphere to create sulfate aerosols with a residence time of about 2–3 years.”

“Emission rates of [Sulfur Dioxide] SO2 from an active volcano range from 10 million tonnes/day according to the style of volcanic activity and type and volume of magma involved. For example, the large explosive eruption of Mount Pinatubo on 15 June 1991 expelled 3-5 km3 of dacite magma and injected about 20 million metric tons of SO2 into the stratosphere. The sulfur aerosols resulted in a 0.5-0.6°C cooling of the Earth’s surface in the Northern Hemisphere.”http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php

“The 1815 eruption [of Mount Tambora] is rated 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the only such eruption since the Lake Taupo eruption in about 180 AD. With an estimated ejecta volume of 160 cubic kilometers, Tambora’s 1815 outburst was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.”

because of the effect on North American and European weather. Agricultural crops failed and livestock died in much of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in the worst famine of the 19th century.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora

“In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent “dry fog” was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the “fog”. It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.”

The meme as it is presented is that the earth would be colder without ‘greenhouse gases’, but the figure that is actually used for that comes from the Earth without an atmosphere, i.e. the classic science picture of all the gases in our atmosphere including oxygen and nitrogen comprising Earth’s Greenhouse and what the temp would be without this. Taking water out of this would give a temp of 67°C. cooling the Earth not warming it – and the difference with and without water is remarkable. Whatever ‘warming’ carbon dioxide is capable of – surely it can’t match the Sun’s heat and water shrugs that off…

Leif – you’re talking gibberish. Molecules take up space, real molecules that is. Earth’s atmosphere at the surface is at 15°C is 78% nitrogen 21% oxygen dry air, so less with water included. It is not empty space, it is not nothing. I’ve just had a thought, are you confused because gases are compressible?

Anyway, your and AGWScience’s imagining an atmosphere based on ideal gas properties, i.e., none, leads to the nonsense that keeps getting spouted by ‘warmists’ that gases can’t stratify and spontaneously thoroughly mix and can’t be unmixed for example above, clearly not what is observed in the real world. That these peculiar ideas exist at all in our day and age is a sad consequence of AGWScience influence in the education system especially in the last couple of decades. It’s from this use of ideal gas law mangling out of context of real world physical properties and deliberate exclusion of the full history of scientific knowledge to date, here van der Waals, elsewhere Arrenhius, which shows the duplicity of AGWScience. And shows that without the real basic understanding of properties and processes and relationships a warmist can’t get to grips with how weather systems work, in which such aspects as convection and thermodynamics are essential knowledge..

Myrrh says:
July 24, 2011 at 7:34 pmLeif – you’re talking gibberish. Molecules take up space, real molecules that is.
Perhaps you cannot read.
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 17, 2011 at 6:35 pm
“Recall that one molecule has a volume of 6.54E-29 cubic meter, so the total volume of all the molecules in that 1 cubic meter becomes 2.7E+25*6.54E-29 = 0.00175 cubic meter.”
So the real N2 molecule takes up 6.54E-29 cubic meter of space. Agree?
The volumes [=space] of all the molecules in one cubic meter of N2 is thus 0.00175 cubic meter. Agree?

“Meaning that there is 1 – 0.00175 = 0.99825 cubic meters not occupied by any molecules or by anything else, i.e. is empty.”
Agree?

“This matches well what the link to Van der Waals said about a real gas: ” In general, at normal laboratory temperatures and pressures, the atoms or molecules of a gas only occupy about 1/1000 of the volume of the gas, the rest being empty space”.”
Agree?

Leif – you’re talking gibberish, as usual, because you’re doing everything possible to detract from the point I’m making. Which is, that AGWScience is fiction. That its scenarios are built by taking laws out of context, of misattributing properties and processes and so on. You can’t argue for AGW as if its based on real science fact because its ‘scienc’e is fantasy., All I’m doing here, as you well know, is pointing out where izen’s particular nonsense came from. And, as usual, you have no answer for that.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/30/earths-climate-system-is-ridiculously-complex-with-draft-link-tutorial/#comment-693457

izen says: The molecules of gas are moving at around 500m/s or about a THOUSAND miles an hour. There is no way with those velocities you will get gases stratifying out by weight within the first few miles of the atmosphere. If they did… O2 heaver than N2, we would be walking in a few inches of CO2 and with our heads in pure oxygen!

Not only does real life prove him wrong, well known in traditional science and industry that he is wrong, but still taught to juniors by experiments they can do themselves to know he is wrong.

So there are two things of great importance here, the first is that izen believes in a science fiction fantasy world created by the AGWScience magisterium, actually believes it to be our physical reality, and the second, that because of this, izen has zilch appreciation of the actual real physical world around him.

And you, as you’ve shown here, can’t deal with that demonstrable truth either. What a waste, it seems to me, of an otherwise intelligent mind.

Myrrh says:
July 25, 2011 at 12:32 pmLeif – you’re talking gibberish
A technical argument [especially with numbers and math] may to the unwashed masses look like gibberish…

where izen’s particular nonsense came from
izen is absolutely correct. Balloons and high-flying aircraft show that CO2 is well mixed up to at least 30 km altitude, regardless of what anybody [izen, you, me, …] think is going on.

But that and the issue about ideal vs. real gases are totally disconnected from AGW. Have nothing to do with AGW and is not a fiction invented by AGW people as this is basic physics known for a century.

Now,many people have problems with an argument chain with more than one link. So perhaps we take it one link at a time. You admitted that a real molecule has volume. I showed you that a real N2 molecule has a volume of 6.54E-29 cubic meter and asked you if you agreed. You avoided the question, so I ask again. If you disagree with the number I gave, what volume do you think the molecule has, if any?

I think you’re Ira Glickstein and you’re still interfering with my posting here as you began to do in your last discussion, abusing author privileges. Here, I have to painfully wait several seconds for each character to appear on the screen, elsewhere posting on WUWT I don’t…

So, it’s probably you responsible for the background tweaks, such as making this thread disappear from search, now re-instated since I mentioned it above, and my back links to posts in your discussions from other boards come up 404…?

Anthony has always appeared to me to be completely genuine – oblivious to how others see both Ira and Leif. I can’t believe he knows or fully appreciates the extent of this hijacking of his site. Or just how poisonous an influence they can be masquerading as friends..

I don’t know if this is something others with disagreements with either of these have perienced? Remind me Leif, who was it complained of your screwing up their website?

This interference in my posting is costing me money, I pay for access to the net, as well as stealing my time. This last sentence has taken around three minutes to appear, including correction time..

As for the rest of your inability to understand volumes in context of the point I’m making – sound doesn’t travel in your world of empty space and like the imaginary ideal gases that make it up, it only exists between your ears.

Myrrh says:
July 26, 2011 at 4:10 pmHmm, iirc, it was Vukcevic.
Can’t take him seriously on that.

As for the rest of your inability to understand volumes in context of the point I’m making – sound doesn’t travel in your world of empty space and like the imaginary ideal gases that make it up, it only exists between your ears.

Yes, sound does travel in both ideal and real gases by molecules getting a kick from some impulse and transmitting that kick to the next molecule it collides with [trillions of time per second]

Now back to your understanding of volume and space.
You admitted that a real molecule has volume. I showed you that a real N2 molecule has a volume of 6.54E-29 cubic meter and asked you if you agreed. You avoided the question, so I ask again. If you disagree with the number I gave, what volume do you think the molecule has, if any?
You avoided the question again. Either you don’t know or don’t like the answer. Which is it? or better yet: answer the simple question. Do you deny that a real N2 molecule has a volume of 6.54E-29 cubic meter?

Do stop pretending that you know what you’re talking about Leif, you’ve already shown you don’t understand volumes earlier here, when you said “air is a very high approximation to an ideal gas” and described “all gases are molecules/atoms that move around at typically 1000 miles/hour through empty space” and “It is moving at that speed all the time between collisions with other molecules which happens billions of times per second. These collisions change the direction of the molecules all the time so it takes some time to actually get to your window, but it will get there, and the speed would still be 1414 mph [at 15C]”

For anyone still thinking Leif knows what he’s talking about.. This is a description straight out of AGWscience’s manipulation of real science, AGWScience fiction taking ideal gas descriptions out of context..

What is so difficult to understand that the air around you is not empty space, but filled cheek by jowl with molecules taking up empty space? Real molecules have volume, you are describing movement of imaginary ideal gas molecules which don’t have volume, that is, they take up no space so imagined to have empty space all around them. These imaginary molecules don’t have weight, or interactions as attraction with other molecules, that’s why they’re described as bouncing off other molecules and so ‘mixing’ or ‘travelling’. Real gas molecules do not travel across the room from bumping into each other! That’s just stupid! Because they have real volume, real weight, are subject to real gravity, have real interactions with each other, attraction, not bouncing off each other like volumeless ideal imaginary gases, real gases don’t move at those speeds across a room. Real air is a volume of fluid, not empty space. The individual molecules are constrained by the volume of the molecules around them. There’s one ton/sq ft of this volume of liquid gas air pressing down on you now, and flowing around you whenever it is windy..

As I’ve given before, please, anyone still thinking Leif knows what he’s talking about, read the link, look at the pictures, understand that air is a fluid gaseous mass made up of real molecules with volume and not empty space – or we would not hear any sounds: http://www.mediacollege.com/audio/01/sound-waves.html

Until you, generic AGWScience believers, get to grips with the simple fact that the air around you is not empty space, but a real fluid gaseous entity with volume and weight, you will not be able to understand convection and so how heat is transferred through convection in our atmosphere of the fluid gas Air, and without that understanding you will not be able to appreciate how winds are formed, which are volumes of the gas Air on the move. And without that knowledge you won’t be able to understand that volumes of Air do not cross hemispheres, ‘winds’ do not thoroughly mix the gas molecules, etc. any more than the imaginary movement of ‘volumeless ideal gas molecules in empty space’ do. And if you can’t appreciate that simple physical real world basic, what the h*ll do you think are you are doing pontificating about climate?

AGWScience fiction has delibately confused you here. Don’t be confused further by self-professed ‘expert teachers’ who show as Leif does here, that he can’t deal with the true physical nature of our atmosphere, so spends his time obfuscating.

Izen, you can prove for yourself that heavier than air gases sink through air, and lighter than air gases rise in air – so you can see for yourself that your claim, the meme you’ve got from AGWScience fiction, that gases do not separate out –

The molecules of gas are moving at around 500m/s or about a THOUSAND miles an hour. There is no way with those velocities you will get gases stratifying out by weight within the first few miles of the atmosphere.

is nonsense.

Methane layers at the ceiling in mines, a well known hazard in this industry. Carbon dioxide layers at the ground, a well known hazard around volcanic vents and in brewing, and used in fire extinguishers because it will sink and displace the oxygen need to keep a fire burning. Real life, and real industry, applied science, contradicts the fictional world created by AGWScience.

The CO2-rich cloud was expelled rapidly from the southern floor of Lake Nyos. It rose as a jet with a speed of about 100 km per hour. The cloud quickly enveloped houses within the crater that were 120 meters above the shoreline of the lake. Because CO2 is about 1.5 times the density of air, the gaseous mass hugged the ground surface and descended down valleys along the north side of the crater. The deadly cloud was about 50 meters thick and it advanced downslope at a rate of 20 to 50 km per hour. This deadly mist persisted in a concentrated form over a distance of 23 km, bringing sudden death to the villages of Nyos, Kam, Cha, and Subum.

The Carbon dioxide because heavier than air displaced all the oxygen and suffocated people and animals. It flowed, fluid gas, back down the slopes hugging the ground. This is a typical hazard around volcanic vents, such as in Hawaii, the carbon dioxide flows down into hollows where it will stay, because heavier than air, until another force moves it, such as wind. Each individual molecule does this, it is when there are many such molecules together doing this that they present a hazard.

This AGW science fiction world is a deliberate creation to dumb down the general population – there are too many such manipulations of basic physical knowledge for it to be a co-incidence. It takes a very good knowledge of real physics to be able to create these subtle tweaks by cherry picking properties and processes and history out of context. If that doesn’t make you angry, then you don’t fully appreciate the con.

Myrrh says:
July 27, 2011 at 3:14 amDo stop pretending that you know what you’re talking about Leif
You can demonstrate that you know what you are talking about by responding to my probe:
“You admitted that a real molecule has volume. I showed you that a real N2 molecule has a volume of 6.54E-29 cubic meter and asked you if you agreed. You avoided the question, so I ask again. If you disagree with the number I gave, what volume do you think the molecule has, if any?
You avoided the question again. Either you don’t know or don’t like the answer. Which is it? or better yet: answer the simple question. Do you deny that a real N2 molecule has a volume of 6.54E-29 cubic meter?”

That you do not is telling enough.
All your examples are irrelevant to the debate. If left long enough all these gases would be mixed throughout the lower atmosphere by convection and eddy diffusion. The distinction between ideal and real gases is irrelevant for AGW as air is very close to an ideal gas.

justthefactswuwt says:
July 28, 2011 at 9:24 pm
“What are your thoughts on this one?:
“appears to be generated in the Earth’s core by a dynamo process, associated with the circulation of liquid metal in the core, driven by internal heat sources”
or could be generated by the movement of sea water

There are electric current in sea water that create a magnetic field, but that field is 1000 times smaller than the main field generated in the core.

It is not really a climate variable per se, but it is interesting and helpful in understanding magnetic field generation, thus I gave it an honorable mention under section “1. Earth’s Rotational Energy”;

Interesting, the spikes in the lower stratosphere temperature record certainly correlate well with the drop in Apparent Atmospheric Transmission of Solar Radiation associated with the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions:

I was wondering if this was due to destruction of ozone as the atmosphere “cleaned itself” after the eruptions, but yesterday I found a paper that may offer an explanation: One longer-time effect of the volcano eruptions was increased stratospheric water vapor.
”If the frequency of volcanic activity was high enough, then a water vapor anomaly would be introduced into the lower stratosphere before the anomaly due to the previous eruption had disappeared. The result would be threefold in the long term: stratospheric cooling, stratospheric humidification, and surface warming due to the positive radiative forcing associated with the water vapor.”

and “A frost point hygrometer designed for aircraft operation was included in the complement of instruments assembled for the NASA U-2 flights through the plume of Mount St. Helens. Measurements made on the 22 May flight showed the water vapor to be closely associated with the aerosol plume. The water vapor mixing ratio by mass in the plume was as high as 40 x 10–6. This compares with values of 2 x 10–6to 3 x 10–6outside of the plume.”http://www.sciencemag.org/content/211/4484/823.abstract

This paper found that “Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000–2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30% as compared to estimates neglecting this change. These findings show that stratospheric water vapor is an important driver of decadal global surface climate change.”http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5970/1219.full#ref-3

sulfuric acid by the sun’s rays reacting with stratospheric water vapor to form sulfuric acid aerosol layers. The aerosol remains in suspension long after solid ash particles have fallen to earth and forms a layer of sulfuric acid droplets between 15 to 25 kilometers up. Fine ash particles from an eruption column fall out too quickly to significantly cool the atmosphere over an extended period of time, no matter how large the eruption.

Sulfur aerosols last many years, and several historic eruptions show a good correlation of sulfur dioxide layers in the atmosphere with a decrease in average temperature decrease of subsequent years. The close correlation was first established after the 1963 eruption of Agung volcano in Indonesia when it was found that sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and stayed as a sulfuric acid aerosol.

Without replenishment, the sulfuric acid aerosol layer around the earth is gradually depleted, but it is renewed by each eruption rich in sulfur dioxide. This was confirmed by data collected after the eruptions of El Chichon, Mexico (1982) and Pinatubo, Philippines (1991), both of which were high-sulfur compound carriers like Agung, Indonesia.”http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm

There seems to be evidence that Polar Vortices and Sudden Stratospheric Warming events can have a significant impact on water vapor, i.e. “A sudden and unexplained drop in the amount of water vapor present high in the atmosphere almost a decade ago has substantially slowed the rate of warming at Earth’s surface in recent years, scientists say.

In late 2000 and early 2001, concentrations of water vapor in a narrow slice of the lower stratosphere dropped by 0.5 parts per million, or about 10 percent, and have remained relatively stable since then. Because the decline was noted by several types of instruments, including some on satellites and others lofted on balloons, the sharp decrease is presumed to be real, says Karen Rosenlof, a meteorologist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

And because water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, the decline has slowed the increase of global temperatures, Rosenlof, Susan Solomon, also of NOAA in Boulder, and their colleagues report online January 28 and in an upcoming Science.”
According to this paper on the Final Warming Date of the Antarctic Polar Vortex and Influences on its Interannual Variability;http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7598/is_20091115/ai_n42654411/

“The first three Arctic winters of the ACE mission represented two extremes of winter variability: Stratospheric sudden warmings (SSWs) in 2004 and 2006 were among the strongest, most prolonged on record; 2005 was a record cold winter.”

“Temperature and vortex evolution was very similar in the two years [2004 and 2006], with the vortex breaking down throughout the stratosphere, reforming quickly in the upper stratosphere, while remaining weak in the middle and (especially) lower stratosphere.”

“2005 was the coldest winter on record in the lower stratosphere, but with an early final warming in mid-March.”

“Disparate temperature profile structure and vortex evolution resulted in much lower (higher) temperatures in the upper (lower) stratosphere in 2004 and 2006 than in 2005. Satellite temperatures agree well with lidar data up to 50–60 km, and ACE-FTS, MLS and SABER show good agreement in high-latitude temperatures throughout the winters. Consistent with a strong, cold upper stratospheric vortex and enhanced radiative cooling after the SSWs, MLS and ACE-FTS trace gas measurements show strongly enhanced descent in the upper stratospheric vortex in late January through March 2006 compared to that in 2005.”

So could part of the warming in the 80s and 90s actually be caused by – and only briefly counteracted by! – the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions? I think so (but in the meantime AGW proponents are using volcano cooling for what it’s worth and even ignore the step change and talk about a downward “trend” in stratosphere temperatures as a “proof of AGW theory).

I think a “part of the warming in the 80s and 90s”could “be caused by – and only briefly counteracted by! – the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions”, but think that there is much more work to be done to figure out how big this part might be.

Just wanted to throw in yet another effect that may add to the complexity ;-)

remain in the stratosphere for only a few months, they have only minor climatic effects, and they can be spread around the world by high-altitude winds. This suspended material contributes to spectacular sunsets.

sulfuric acid by the sun’s rays reacting with stratospheric water vapor to form sulfuric acid aerosol layers. The aerosol remains in suspension long after solid ash particles have fallen to earth and forms a layer of sulfuric acid droplets between 15 to 25 kilometers up. Fine ash particles from an eruption column fall out too quickly to significantly cool the atmosphere over an extended period of time, no matter how large the eruption.

Sulfur aerosols last many years, and several historic eruptions show a good correlation of sulfur dioxide layers in the atmosphere with a decrease in average temperature decrease of subsequent years. The close correlation was first established after the 1963 eruption of Agung volcano in Indonesia when it was found that sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and stayed as a sulfuric acid aerosol.

Without replenishment, the sulfuric acid aerosol layer around the earth is gradually depleted, but it is renewed by each eruption rich in sulfur dioxide. This was confirmed by data collected after the eruptions of El Chichon, Mexico (1982) and Pinatubo, Philippines (1991), both of which were high-sulfur compound carriers like Agung, Indonesia.”http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm

There is also some evidence that if “volcanic activity was high enough, then a water vapor anomaly would be introduced into the lower stratosphere before the anomaly due to the previous eruption had disappeared. The result would be threefold in the long term: stratospheric cooling, stratospheric humidification, and surface warming due to the positive radiative forcing associated with the water vapor.”
See: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2003)016%3C3525%3AAGSOVE%3E2.0.CO%3B2#h1

notes that there is a “well-examined but unattributed 1980–2000 period of stratospheric water vapor growth. Trends are determined for five 2 km stratospheric layers (16–26 km) utilizing weighted, piecewise regression analyses. Stratospheric water vapor abundance increased by an average of 1.0 ± 0.2 ppmv (27 ± 6%) during 1980–2010 with significant shorter-term variations along the way. Growth during period 1 (1980–1989) was positive and weakened with altitude from 0.44 ± 0.13 ppmv at 16–18 km to 0.07 ± 0.07 ppmv at 24–26 km. Water vapor increased during period 2 (1990–2000) by an average 0.57 ± 0.25 ppmv, decreased during period 3 (2001–2005) by an average 0.35 ± 0.04 ppmv, then increased again during period 4 (2006–2010) by an average 0.49 ± 0.17 ppmv. The diminishing growth with altitude observed during period 1 is consistent with a water vapor increase in the tropical lower stratosphere that propagated to the midlatitudes. In contrast, growth during periods 2 and 4 is stronger at higher altitudes, revealing contributions from at least one mechanism that strengthens with altitude, such as methane oxidation. The amount of methane oxidized in the stratosphere increased considerably during 1980–2010, but this source can account for at most 28 ± 4%, 14 ± 4%, and 25 ± 5% of the net stratospheric water vapor increases during 1980–2000, 1990–2000, and 1980–2010, respectively.”

With regard to the earth´s rotation causing plate tectonics, there are additional issues such as lithospheric convection and heat loss. Heat loss is achieved by so-called hot-spot volcanoes. Hawaii is an example on earth, whereas Mons Olympus is an example on Venus. On earth, in addition, the planet loses heat via plate tectonics, via lines of volcanoes at mid ocean ridges and at subduction zones (upwelling and downwelling limbs of convection respectively).

With regard to the earth´s rotation causing plate tectonics, there are additional issues such as lithospheric convection and heat loss. Heat loss is achieved by so-called hot-spot volcanoes. Hawaii is an example on earth, whereas Mons Olympus is an example on Venus. On earth, in addition, the planet loses heat via plate tectonics, via lines of volcanoes at mid ocean ridges and at subduction zones (upwelling and downwelling limbs of convection respectively).

are phylogenetically diverse, but groups that include conspicuous or biogeochemically-important taxa include the sulfur-oxidizing gamma and epsilon proteobacteria, the Aquificaeles, the Methanogenic archaea and the neutrophilic iron-oxidizing bacteria.”

is the biological conversion of one or more carbon molecules (usually carbon dioxide or methane) and nutrients into organic matter using the oxidation of inorganic molecules (e.g. hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide) or methane as a source of energy, rather than sunlight, as in photosynthesis.”

Plate Tectonics was said to be powered by Descending Slab Pull. I have never understood how doubling the drag on something would cause it to pull anything. Eureka!! If the core rotates faster than the lithosphere/mantle then this would explain plate tectonics. It would also explain why there is more movement to the west than east. Thank You.

No, thank you, as I only had Plate Tectonics categorized under section “1. Earth’s Rotational Energy”, whereas you correctly point out that gravity is the most important driver of Plate Tectonics, i.e. “The most important forces: gravity = “ridge push” and “slab pull” (Forsyth and Uyeda, 1975)”;http://www.columbia.edu/~vjd1/driving_forces_basic.htm

force is a tectonic plate force due to subduction. Plate motion is partly driven by the weight of cold, dense plates sinking into the mantle at trenches. This force and the slab suction force account for most of the overall force acting on plate tectonics, and the ridge push force accounts for 5 to 10% of the overall force.”

and “Ridge Push;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridge_push
or sliding plate force is a proposed mechanism for plate motion in plate tectonics. Because mid-ocean ridges lie at a higher elevation than the rest of the ocean floor, gravity causes the ridge to push on the lithosphere that lies farther from the ridge.”

force is a tectonic plate force due to subduction. Plate motion is partly driven by the weight of cold, dense plates sinking into the mantle at trenches. This force and the slab suction force account for most of the overall force acting on plate tectonics, and the Ridge Push;http://en.wikipedia.org

Ack. Look, sorry; yesterday wasn’t a good day. I hope you’ll accept my apology for what I see now was a fairly snippy first comment.

No worries. For reference, this article has 7,166 views to date, which is small in the scheme of major WUWT articles, but still indicative of a significant audience for such involved resources. Interestingly, the most viewed page on WUWT is the Sea Ice Reference Page;http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/